


Filmmaking for Assholes

by screamlet



Category: Actor RPF, Star Trek RPF
Genre: Community: rpf_big_bang, Filmmaking, Gen, Meta, POV Multiple, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-17
Updated: 2011-10-17
Packaged: 2017-10-24 17:45:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Zach's 34th birthday, J.J. Abrams give him the reins of the <i>Star Trek</i> reboot franchise and tells Zach to give him a script, a cast, and a shooting schedule by the end of the summer. Not to be left out, Chris helps out by turning the original screenwriters' swamp of notes into a shooting script and John takes over casting duties. Despite three months of whining, cereal, sighing, whining, and cross-country banter, they might just manage to get this movie together and make something new of their careers.</p><p>Set during the summer of 2011.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Proposing -- Zach's Birthday -- June 2011

**Author's Note:**

> ALL RIGHT, MY FIRST BIG BANG. Endless thanks to the people who had to hear the whining associated with writing something of this length, and to those who frequently provided the talking cure when I was on something. You know who you are and you're completely wonderful.
> 
> Very importantly, there's gorgeous art to go with this by the amazing and patient [maggie2mw](http://maggie2mw.livejournal.com/), which you can find [here](http://maggie2mw.livejournal.com/21229.html). I've also included them embedded into the story, so: yay. Maggie, thank you for pointing out the completely obvious -- that this story is a lot about components and the sum of those parts rather than like, OH HEY THIS IS WHAT CHRIS'S BEARD LOOKS LIKE AT THIS POINT IN JULY (something I'd personally like to forget, thanks).
> 
> Something to keep in mind about this story as you read is that it's what it says on the box -- it's a story about making another _Star Trek_ movie, and how to move forward from where the last movie left off. It's also about these guys and how they've evolved from who they were 2-3 years ago when they worked together so intensely, how they've changed since then, and where they can go from here. It's not a story putting forth any particular ship, though there are past and current relationships that come up. There's obviously elements of meta in this because I like meta and that's the kind of story I thought I needed to tell.
> 
> If you're looking for the epic story of how Zach and Chris made a blockbuster movie and fell in love again, THIS ISN'T IT. I promise you -- it's not. You can read therumjournals's very terrific [Merry Bachelors](http://archiveofourown.org/works/190383) for that.
> 
> OKAY, ON WITH THE SHOW.

Yeah, it did feel like J.J. was watching over them all, particularly when he shows up 3000 miles away from his fucking batcave in Zach’s townhouse just as Zach sighs the words, “post-Gatsby.”

“Really?” J.J. asks, forcing at least two people in the immediate vicinity to do a spit take on each other that emphasizes to Zach just how big of a fucking deal it is that J.J. Abrams has shown up in his house on the night of the party celebrating his 34th birthday. “Hey, Zach.”

“Hey, J.J., man, it’s been so long, hasn’t it?” Zach asks as he goes in to embrace J.J., who does his usual hesitant embrace-and-gentle-pat-on-the-back before he pulls away again. “Like… um… well, whatever, it’s been _so long_ , is what I’m getting at.”

“Yeah, I got that from the two times you said that just now,” J.J. says. “But seriously. Post-Gatsby? Shit’s that dire?”

“Uh,” Zach stammers.

“Can we talk somewhere private?” J.J. asks. 

“Yeah, sure, ‘scuse me, everyone,” Zach says to the couple of people in the tight circle around him. 

As he leaves, Christian (his co-star from _Angels_ and one of the people who spit his beer out all over some hot young thing from _Catch Me If You Can_ ), turns to said hot-young-thing and asks, “I didn’t imagine the late 90s, right? That crazy fuck was responsible for _Alias_ and _Felicity_ , right?”

“Oh my God, who the fuck watched _Felicity_?” the hot-young-thing, Aaron, asks. “Keep that shit to yourself, okay?”

“Shut up,” Christian snaps. “She followed Scott Foley to New York for love."

“No she didn’t,” Aaron replies. “She followed a _different_ Scott to NYU, and then she settled for Scott-Foley-the-RA, who married Jennifer Garner, who starred in _Alias_ , who then left Scott Foley for Vaughn on _Alias_ , and that didn’t last either.”

Christian stares at the hot young thing in front of him and tilts his head a little, and then says, “You know, for having found my soulmate just now — soulmate being defined in this day and age as _someone who has seen all the same TV shows as me_ — I also feel like I kind of want to die? Because I know exactly what you’re talking about and no one outside of a college campus or a writers’ room should have this encyclopedic knowledge of television.”

“Wait, back up,” Aaron says, “Does this mean I finally made your list of guys-you’d-go-gay-for? Please please please. You like needy, right?”

While that conversation continues, Zach takes J.J. down the hall to the room he’s attempting to turn into a den/office/library, but currently only holds a sad excuse for an IKEA/Lifehacker hybrid bookcase and not very many books at all. It does have a set of pretty nice armchairs, though, and that’s what makes the room right now.

“So should I even bother asking how you are?” J.J. asks. “Because if you’re saying phrases like _post-Gatsby_ outside of your own head, it can’t be very good.”

“It was a joke,” Zach protests too casually.

“Yeah, whatever,” J.J. replies as he sits in the armchair Zach points out for him. “If that makes you feel better. Anyway, so is it just an act or are you really mid-existential-crisis right now? Because I have a project that might pull you out of that. Or pull you deeper into it, I’m really not sure if _post-Gatsby_ is all I have to go on.”

“Really, you’re latching onto _that_?” Zach asks. “What about how my hair looks like a parrot’s? I mean, I really like it like this, but that means _I look good as a parrot_ and I don’t like the implications of that.”

“Parrots don’t have hair and if you don’t like it, shave your head.”

“Been there, done that, and I’m enjoying this,” Zach says as he carefully waves his drink around his head, “Before it becomes a bowl cut, if you don’t mind.”

“Hey, good, you brought up _Star Trek_ 15 seconds before I did, so let’s talk,” J.J. says. Zach doesn’t think he’s ever met anyone, not in Pittsburgh or LA or New York, who talks as fast as J.J. does, but that can’t be surprising considering J.J. is some kind of freakish hybrid forged in New York and brought into terrifying relief in LA. Granted, the same goes for a lot of people, but none of those people have caffeine and pure meth instead of blood like J.J. does. “Can I give you a status report?”

“Uh, okay,” Zach says. He’s been standing all this time with his drink, but finally sits down across from J.J., who takes a moment to gear up for what’s sure to be a fucking torrent of information and mild hysteria. “What’s… what’s up? Did you get the script?”

“Okay, status report,” J.J. says, ignoring him. “There’s no fucking script. I got a word doc from Orci that’s half caps locked ideas that make no sense because I’ve only seen four episodes of _Trek_ in my goddamn life and the other half is, like, bulleted plot points, admittedly decent lines, and a whole bunch of crap that Alex shoved in because he wants to see shit blow up.”

“So there’s no script,” Zach clarifies.

“Are you drunk?”

“No?”

“Okay, just checking, because _I said_ there was no fucking script. Then there’s the fact that if we want to get _anyone_ good for these new characters they’re introducing, we need to have a script, devise casting descriptions and open calls, and see who’s going to open their fucking mouths and say _I want to be in Star Trek_. I mean, that’s how we found you and Cho, right?”

“Right,” Zach says slowly.

“More importantly,” J.J. sighs, “I don’t have the time for this bullshit. Like, when my nerd triad said they were going to lock themselves in a hotel room and finish the script, I thought that meant they were going to lock themselves in a hotel room and finish the script, not like, tweet all fucking day and then drive _Hawaii Five-0_ into the fucking ground, am I right?”

“I haven’t really watched,” Zach admits.

“I’m gonna blow up the fucking island,” J.J. decides, not really looking at Zach anymore. “I don’t care if it’s not my show, I’m gonna tell Alex that he needs to blow up everything and turn that shit post-apocalyptic dystopian — maybe _that’ll_ scare them into writing a good show again.”

“And what’s that have to do with _Star Trek_?” Zach asks.

“What are you going to do with your summer, Zach?” J.J. asks. “And the rest of your life? Are you too old to be my badly paid associate producer who, due to my minions having stacked their buffet plates way too high with shit I’m barely if even tangentially interested in, would actually be the de facto producer calling home every two weeks to catch me up on shit?”

“Wait, you want me to make the next movie?” 

“I want you to produce it,” J.J. clarifies. 

Zach’s mouth opens to say something, but there’s a small knock at the door. He turns and sees Jonathan, a couple of tendrils coming out of their carefully-Zach-styled enclosure to hang into his face, leaning against the door frame. 

“Hey, sorry to interrupt,” he says. “Are you ready for your cake? When should I come get you for your surprise cake?”

“Twenty minutes,” J.J. says over Zach’s shoulder. Zach turns back and J.J. says, “I can’t talk actual business for more than twenty minutes; I tend to like, lose my caffeine rush and kind of fall asleep from boredom.”

“Chris thought you had narcolepsy,” Zach replies.

“Oh, no,” J.J. laughs. “I just didn’t want to hear how he found a surprising muse for his characterization of Kirk in some Lorrie Moore collection.”

“But have you read —“

“Are you serious,” J.J. says as he laughs some more and claws at his face. “ _Glee_ , could you give us twenty minutes?”

Zach looks back at Jonathan, who tilts his head in that confused puppy way that seems to plague the men Zach fucks, and widens his eyes in what might be a pleading way. Jonathan seems to pick up the hint and straightens up, giving Zach a small smile from the corner of his mouth.

“I’ll be in the kitchen, okay? Come find me when you’re done,” Jonathan says.

“Sure,” Zach says with all the reassurance he can muster.

Jonathan leaves and Zach turns back to J.J., who was watching the doorway after Jonathan had left. “What a sweet kid,” J.J. comments. “Don’t ruin his life, okay?”

“Oh, no way,” Zach says. He smiles a little and adds, almost confidentially, “I think he’s going to stick around for a while, you know? And I’d — he’s really —“

“Your other ex said something really smart on _Modern Family_ , not this season but the first one,” J.J. says as he thinks back. “Finally watched that on DVD — anyway, it was about how people can only change 15% for others. Just remember that before you dive too deeply into your Hallmark Hall of Fame Movie and check out the foreclosed farms for sale in rural Pennsylvania, okay?”

“ _Farms_?” Zach asks incredulously. 

J.J. clears his throat and says aloud, “Should have gotten a drink before coming in here. Anyway. Trek number whatever. I want you to produce this movie _for real_ , and not the bullshit Before the Door crap you’ve been playing at lately.”

“Excuse me,” Zach interrupts with just a tiny bit of offense because, well, it’s true. “Remember that feature we sold at Sundance this year?”

“Yeah, at the last minute, and after all that it was only for a million,” J.J. replies. “That buys like, twenty minutes of editing the seams on your prosthetic ears. Shit, a million wouldn’t even get Jeremy Irons naked in a movie for 30 seconds, and he used to get naked for _everything_. And do you think I don’t know Anton’s movie got four times as much?”

“Okay, it wasn’t _Anton’s_ movie, he was just in it, there’s a big difference.” Zach tries, he really does, he _tries_ to stop himself from sulking but it’s too late — he sinks into his armchair and drains the last of his drink while J.J. watches him and offers that long-suffering sigh that’s the closest thing to an apology anyone outside his immediate family will ever get.

“What I’m saying is that they’re not really _your movies_ , Zach,” J.J. finishes. “You bought the playground and donated it to some underprivileged kids, and you come down to visit the inner city every year to check up on things and have a sloppy joe with them while taking some photos to include in this year’s glossy investors’ report, but it’s not _your movie_. It’s a good thing you’ve done, but it’s not _your movie_.”

“And you want to give me a movie,” Zach says, trying to stop his feathers from feeling so fucking ruffled _dammit, J.J._

J.J. thinks about it for a moment and nods. “I want to give you some actual fucking responsibility and accountability — I think you’ve been hiding behind your partners and your acting for too long.” He glances at Zach and adds, “I know you want it.  You want the challenge but you can’t take the risk while it’s you and your friends’ production company and your money on the line, and I get that. So hide behind me and all my proto-Spielbergian splendor —“

“Man, I feel dirty listening to you,” Zach says as he tries to hide the very real squirm he feels in his body. He swallows thickly and asks in a quiet voice, a voice he hopes Jonathan can’t hear even though he seems to hear _everything_ that happens in the house no matter where it is or how quiet, “So what would I do?”

“What?” J.J. asks. “Sorry, my 20-minute threshold approaches.”

“Tell me what I’d do,” Zach repeats.

“You _produce_ the movie — producers _make_ movies, I know I said this already.” Zach is about to interrupt, but J.J. seems to draw from deep-seated Diet Coke reserves somewhere in his soul and waves at him so he shuts up. “I’ll be gone all summer doing press for _Super 8_ , so you need to get the movie together for the fall.”

“Get the movie together?” Zach asks incredulously. 

“You need to make a movie that someone will want to make,” J.J. explains. “Which right now means: get a script. That’s the most important thing. Bob, Alex and Damon — I love them, trust them with my life, but at this rate they’re never gonna write that fucking script, so you have to find someone who will. I think you know what kind of a movie I want to make — a soft sci-fi action movie where everyone’s too beautiful and they talk faster than anyone should and then there’s lens flares. Get people who’ll write that script, and once you have a script, get the kids back on board and revved up, and find someone to cast some more big names.” J.J. leans back in the chair and says, “That’s really all a movie is — the cameras and shit are the easy part, man. I’ll give you until September. In September, you give me a movie and if it’s good, if I like it, we’ll go to the studio and film the shit out of it.”

“And if you don’t?” Zach asks cautiously. “If you don’t like it, I mean.”

“Then we’re back to square one,” J.J. sighs. “And, I don’t know, I’ll tear out your fingernails and torture Bryan Burk until he gets off _Fringe_ ’s dick and focuses 10,000% on _Trek_. And I’ll write the fucking script myself. On my iPad.”

Zach zones out a little and finds himself in a strange middle state where he’s planning how he’s going to make all this happen in just three fucking months, but a part of him is also shrieking that he can still say no and do any of the million things he vaguely promised he’d do if _Trek_ wasn’t ready for pre-production by this point.

No, dammit, J.J. played him like a round of Words with Friends on the job — quickly, stealthily, and way too nonchalant about his use of the word _solariums_. 

“Okay, I’ve got family to see,” J.J. says as he stands up and pats Zach on the shoulder. “So get your team together, our people will work some kind of payment out, and remember: I need your first update two weeks from today, and that update better have the name of a script writer and how far into the rabbit hole they’ve gone.”

J.J. leaves and doesn’t stick around for Zach’s cake and birthday song.

*

Later, Zach is out in his tiny, tiny backyard with Jonathan curled up on his lap, the last decadent remnants of the birthday party scattered around them. If Zach closes his eyes, he can hear the faint shouts of that very blond, very young Chris Hanke who sings and dances with Dan Radcliffe every night, and that Chris is totally egging on Christian Borle in making out with that kid from _Catch Me If You Can_ , probably with a margarita in one hand and and an even bigger margarita in the other, and where exactly did those margaritas come from? Who was making margaritas in his house and why didn’t he get one?

Zach tries desperately to ignore a whole lot of what’s going on and focus on… anything. It’s hard to focus on any one thing, though, not when he’s apparently agreed to produce the next chapter of a multibillion dollar franchise, arguably the most successful franchise _of all goddamn time_ , and he also has to star in it at some point, but that’s really besides the point right now. Jonathan sleepily rests his head on Zach’s shoulder, and Zach blinks and shifts his head to get Jonathan’s hair out of his eyes so he can look up through the leaves of the one tree he has space for in this laughably tiny concrete yard. It’s a bland purple sky with hints of white light pollution, and it’s blank enough to provide some kind of backdrop for his thoughts.

Like what the fuck is he even doing? Where the fuck is he going to make this movie? Can he stay in New York and do it via that magical internet thing or does he have to go back to LA and to his real house with its real office and its real lack of Jonathan — or does he bring him along with the very important caveat that Zach has no time for him because he’ll be making a movie, one that has to be good enough to propel him and his ex-whatever back to crazy hot nerd stardom?

“So before Christian was shoving his tongue down Aaron’s throat in some misguided attempt to prove he’s the last straight man on Broadway,” Jon laughs quietly, “He told me I got an audition in LA.”

“Since when is Christian getting you auditions?” 

“Since that NBC show he’s working on needs dreamy people like me who can sing. Also, I’m kind of a big deal.”

“Hm,” Zach says. “That’s convenient. I was about to tell you I need to go back to LA. Trek stuff.”

“So I was right — that was J.J.?”

Zach’s eyebrows knit together as he wonders how someone could be insulated enough in their theater wankery to not know who J.J. fucking Abrams is, particularly when they’ve been having sex with _Spock_ for the past x months, but he decides not to comment on it in the interest of future fucking. “In the flesh. I’m still not sure how he got here — maybe he teleported. Transwarp bullshit whatever.”

“Are you going to shave your eyebrows already?” Jon asks.

“Probably not until Christmas — just in time for all the holiday photos!”

“So LA, then.”

“I don’t know,” Zach says. He sighs, pulls at Jon a little more, tightens his arms around him, and closes his eyes for a moment. “When I go back to LA, it’s to stay for a while. What about you?”

“You know me,” Jon says, adding his sigh to their two-sighers chorus. “I’ll go where the work is.” 

“Sounds sensible.”

“Also sensible? Going to bed. Come on, carry me in, I’m _tired_.”

“Nah, sleeping outside’ll be good for you,” Zach says as he tries to pry himself off of Jonathan, but he laughs and gives up. He rests his forehead against Jonathan again and says, “All right, I’ll race you to falling asleep outside. Ready, set…”

“You talk too much,” Jonathan yawns. He gets up out of Zach’s lap and stands up so he can stretch. “Go kick everyone out so we can go to bed.”

“They can show themselves out.”

Jonathan gives him a Look that immediately reminds Zach who, exactly, is still left in the house and how they’re not the type to go peacefully. 

“Game plan,” Zach says. “You get ready for bed, I’ll kick those menacing singing-dancing hooligans out, we postpone hot birthday sex until tomorrow morning and… yeah?”

“Efficient, practical, and _so_ romantic,” Jon says as he yawns again. “Where do I sign up?”

“It’s part of the all-inclusive,” Zach replies. He gets out of his chair and does his best football-player growl. “READY? BREAK!”

“Huh? I don’t think… do people actually say that? In sports?”

“Uh, you think I know?”

Jonathan laughs and nods. “Fair enough. All right, let’s go.”


	2. Producing -- New York -- June 2011

  
(art by [maggie2mw](http://maggie2mw.livejournal.com/21229.html))

  


That night, Zach gets into bed, kisses Jonathan’s shoulder, and then turns on his side and stares at the wall for an hour. He thinks and doesn’t think and unthinks and dethinks. He realizes he’s gone catatonic and then he wonders whether he’s actually become a vegetable and what if his boyfriend doesn’t notice until morning when irreparable nerve damage has taken over and he’s in a wheelchair like Christopher Reeve?

(All of which he knows can’t happen instantaneously without the help of an 18-wheeler or a really fast and persistent van, but his brain doesn’t know any better — and if his brain doesn’t know better, how the fuck can he _produce a movie_?! Also, does anyone else remember Christopher Reeve?)

The problem was that he was searching his brain, his secret Facebook profile, the people he followed on Twitter, people he had met at parties, everyone he had ever been introduced to, and he could not fucking think of a single person qualified to write this fucking script.

At around 2 AM, his phone shakes and flashes CHRISTOS PINEBEARD at him (whatever, he had been drunk at the time). Zach hesitates for a split second and then grabs the phone, accepting the call and strolling out of the bedroom swiftly.

“Dude, were you asleep?”

“Dude, do you care?”

“Nope.” A beat, and then Chris adds, “J.J. called me.”

“What fucking coast is he on? Was _he_ asleep? Does J.J. sleep?”

“If J.J. sleeps in his secret toilet office and no one is around to see him, is he really sleeping? Just one of those riddles we’ll never understand. But he told me about Trek.”

“What’d he tell you?”

“That you’re producing for him and then selling the movie back to him — metaphorically speaking — and you need a screenwriter to eat Bob and Alex’s notes and shit you an awesome script.”

“Also need a casting person. I also need to get everyone back on board, but —”

“Whatever, look, J.J. called me because _he_ remembers all the times you and I talked about making a movie of our own. I wanna write the script, Zach.”

“Are you fucking _kidding_? This isn’t some kind of fucking game. What the fuck have you written?”

“Say ‘fuck’ a few more times.”

“Fuck, Chris, you’re — no, you’re not fucking —“

“Who are you going to get instead? One of your hipster douchebag friends? They’re _terrible_ writers.”

“Yeah, but they can get better! I’ve never seen — okay, I’ve seen stuff you’ve written, but you’ve never written _for the screen_.”

“Yeah, and I still guarantee you that I can do a better job of writing a screenplay than those fucktards who write your hipster history videos — do you _actually_ find that shit amusing? The finished product, I mean, not the PBR-fueled film sessions that never make it to youtube.”

“…You watch my videos?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. You make videos?”

Zach wanders downstairs to his demolished living room and sits on a moist ottoman. He desperately hopes it’s not bodily fluids. He crosses his legs and stares at his couch for a few moments, and then says, “Okay, but the only episodes of _Star Trek_ you’ve seen are the ones we watched in your trailer, and we were kind of giving each other handjobs instead of drinking in the canon and shit.” 

“So get me a nerd consultant — hey, Karl’s unemployed! Simon might be too busy and he’s like, actually a good writer, so how about Karl?”

“Oh Jesus Christ, you assholes together, you’re never going to write anything. I’m going to stay up all night crying to Leonard and begging him to talk me through writing a whole script myself. Mark my fucking words —“

“Karl would _love_ this, and for a dirty, rugged foreigner, he knows his shit about stories and nerd stuff.”

“The fact that you keep calling the franchise we depend on for our livelihood _nerd stuff_ has me a little worried, Christos. Do you still have the beard?”

“The fuck do you care? Can I write it or not?”

Zach shifts to the very edge of the ottoman, supporting himself on his legs rather than actually sitting at this point, as if a balancing trick will help him concentrate. “Audition for it,” Zach says, and that’s inspired so maybe the balancing thing actually works. “In the morning when I’m less crazy and buzzed, maybe I’ll think of more people with a little more experience, right, and I’ll ask everyone for a sample, too. Anyway, write me like, a ten-page sample scene and email it by mid-week. And _ask Karl for help_. The nerd stuff is kind of important when writing _a Star Trek_ movie, you ass.”

“It’ll be in your inbox Wednesday morning. Night, buddy.”

“Ugh, don’t _buddy_ me, I hate you.”

“No you don’t!” Chris sings into the phone. There’s a quick tone in Zach’s ear signaling Chris has hung up. Zach stands up, checks what he was sitting in, and stands in his living room, half-zoned out, for another moment before he heads back upstairs to Jonathan and maybe ten more minutes of sleep before his heartburn takes over again.

*

Wednesday morning arrives and there’s one new email in Zach’s SPACE WRITERZ label - it’s from Chris. The body of the message says:

_TO WHOM IT MAY BUTTS;_

_BUTTS._

_Sincerely,_

_BUTTS._

The attachment has fifteen whole pages (Final Draft generated and everything) of a script Zach really wants to see blow his face off in IMAX.

Not 3D, though. This shit’s too cerebral for big, pinchy glasses, but IMAX? Sure.

Zach replies to the email:

_CHRISTOS PINESTOS;_

_UGH FUCK I HATE YOUR STUPID FUCKING AWFUL TALENTED FUCKING FACE_

_WAY TO ACTUALLY MEET A DEADLINE_

_WAY TO BE FUNNY_

_WAY TO SPELL ‘GARY’ RIGHT_

_I HATE YOUR FACE, YOU’RE SO TERRIBLE_

_IF YOU FUCK UP OUR MOVIE, I WILL FUCKING MURDER YOU_

_CONSIDER THIS A LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT: ONE (1) MOVIE SCRIPT OR YOU LOSE ONE (1) LIFE._

_SINCERELY,_

_ZACHARIAS QUINTONIUS._

And Chris replies:

_God, shut up you nerd, I’m trying to write a sexy action movie with Karl, get off my dick already. Kisses to Jo-jo Groffcakes! Would he like a cameo as a heavily made up outpost prostitute? xxxx_

Zach raises an eyebrow, but shows Jonathan anyway. He laughs and says Chris is just _the best_.

“But not in that way where you leave me for him,” Jon clarifies. “I don’t care how pretty his eyes are or how many six packs he has.”

“Uh, at this rate, I’d say Sasquatch has more of a keg with a beard hanging off it — not a single six pack outside of his fridge, I’m afraid,” Zach sighs. “I should add a clause in that totally binding contract about how he has to get hot for the movie or we’ll re-cast him.”

“Oh, yeah, if he were hot, that might help sell your movie,” Jon chirps, and he wanders off to rehearse a song or have his hair braided by a fawn while Zach stifles his giggles and composes another obscenely caps locked missive to Chris.

*

Zach realizes that recruiting a team for a movie, for a project this big, is difficult. Which: yeah, understatement of his lifetime, but it’s one of those realizations that has to come at him slowly as his bowl of Special K gets soggier and soggier on his desk in his faux office. His computer is on with every piece of organizing software he could possibly find open, but he stares straight ahead at the wall and things reveal themselves to him slowly.

Like J.J.’s nerd triad, who are involved in every single project he does in some way, even if it’s just visiting his secret offices at the home of Bad Robot/Fucking Batshit Crazy, LLC and engaging in the talking cure with him. Zach remembers those early, _early_ Trek meetings when he was the only central actor cast — J.J. and all his producers would sit at a round table and spend _hours_ talking about everything with some intern taking down everything shouted at him. Zach had contributed a little at the time, but very little, like what flavor of Fanta should survive to the 23 rd century (anything but grape).

Zach had left those early meetings wondering why the fuck he had spent an hour or two with all of them debating the merits of having a Starfleet casual uniform for off-duty wear on the _Enterprise_ versus civilian clothing and comparing how that decision had impacted the narrative of the _Harry Potter_ franchise (for fucking real), but he gets it now. It wasn’t because J.J. was secretly a god and engineering his path through life or whatever; J.J. was getting Zach invested in a team. He hadn’t just signed on to _Star Trek_ — he was being adopted into the Abrams-Lindelof-Orci-Kurtzman family, and if he thought that _Trek_ with them would be another project he could just walk away from when it was done, that he wouldn’t care about the people he worked with and make them a permanent part of his life, and if hours-long meetings to figure things out (what things? Any things. All the things.) weren’t his jam, then he should probably back out now. If he was the kind of guy who would spend the long stretches between takes _not_ singing songs from _Oliver!_ at his co-stars, but sitting alone in his trailer every single day, then maybe this wasn’t the project for him.

So as Zach stares at the wall ahead of him and his cereal reaches an alarming sogginess level that he imagines he can _smell_ at that point, he realizes that his team is already around him, and no one quite _gets_ what he and J.J. are trying to do except those who have already helped J.J. make this movie once before. He’ll reach out to the cast and enlist their help in making this movie.

Zach has to scrunch his nose a little because it’s a disgusting gimmick and far too reminiscent of any number of things, like the Muppets saving a film studio or something, but god, it would _fucking work_. J.J.’s vetting process apparently required all of his principals to be multi-talented savants, so they are all well-rounded and fairly brilliant people who _choose_ to be amazing actors, but they could do any number of things. Zoe was practically a professional ballerina before she switched to acting and kicking ass for a living; Chris and John could be English professors collecting mold and molding young minds; Simon is a writer-director-comedian-actor-nerd hero in his own right without _Trek_ ’s help; Karl could literally make any work the most exciting work in the world, but it’s acting that has him bounding around sets like every day is the first day of a new project; Anton is hysterically precious about his music and what it means to him.

It’s a horrible gimmick and Zach hates gimmicks, and he kind of hates that this gimmick would work. It takes a lot of sitting and musing in his little faux office before he sighs deeply and gets up to dump his totally inedible bowl of cereal. It’s a gimmick, Zach reflects, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of merit.

(He looks up the word “gimmick” online and realizes only one of its three definitions implies anything sinister, so. He needs to get over that.)

*

Zach calls Simon first — it’s not that he doesn’t trust Karl, but he doesn’t trust that Chris and Karl can buckle down when they’re in the same room together and get shit done. Chris wrote those ten pages on his own, probably with some online Trek guide to help him along, and adding Karl into the mix — they’re so good at sitting around and bullshitting for hours. That’s probably how Bob and Alex ended up never fucking writing the fucking script in the first place.

“Oh, Zachary,” Simon sighs. “Yeah, no? I’m gonna say no. But it’s very admirable of you to do this for us — get a movie together.”

Fuck, Zach thinks, he hadn’t actually thought anyone would say _no_ to him.

“Wait, no?” Zach asks. “But — you’re kind of the —“

“Oh, I know,” Simon rushes in. “I know, I’m the biggest geek and nerd you know, prince of them all, and I’m also very good at writing and all that, and you know how good I am at everything already from all the work we’ve done together, yes, but that’s why I’ve got a few other things going right now.”

“Oh,” Zach says.

“And I’m in London for the foreseeable future, and intend to be until you and J.J. summon me for pre-production — real pre-production, not development. You know the difference, I take it?”

“This is my crash course,” Zach admits.

“Okay, well. There you go. I’m sorry to say no, I am, especially because it sounds like Karl and Chris are going to have the greatest time on this that anyone has ever had doing anything, but I’ve got my wife and infant daughter and dog to spend time with, and all my friends, and all this _work_ — you understand, of course?”

Zach does eventually manage to get off the phone and return to staring at the wall. He glances at the clock and sees that it’s early in LA, but not so early that Chris shouldn’t be up and working on his fucking script already. 

“Jesu Christos, help me,” Zach whines into the iPhone’s earbud-mouthpiece combo. He lolls back into desk chair and lets all his limbs hang heavily towards the ground as he closes his eyes. “I asked Simon to, you know, maybe play script supervisor and make sure that you and Karl aren’t ruining everything and he _turned me down_.”

“Well, _yeah_ , he’s like an actual writer and everything,” Chris replies. “I could have told you that he’d say no.”

“Why would anyone say no to me!” Zach persists. “Don’t they know how ridiculous all of this is! Don’t they know I’m going to start pouring antacid on my cereal in the mornings! No one’s allowed to say no to me ever, okay, just tell the world, all right?”

“Are you done crying, Zacharina?”

“Lil’ bit. I might cry more in a few minutes.”

“Suck it up, big boy, okay? Can you do that?”

“I guess,” Zach sighs. His head lolls to the side and he sighs deeply. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“Did you call just to whine or did you actually need something from me?”

“Just to whine, but I guess while you’re here — do I need to find a real script supervisor to breathe down your and Karl’s necks? Like — you guys —“

“Okay, I’m going to put on my special Zach handling gloves, okay?” Chris says slowly. “And I’m going to mansplain at you until you get a fucking clue. Are you ready? Say yes or no.”

“……..Yes?” 

“Good. Now, Zach. When two friends love each other very much and come together to work on a professional project, those friends set _boundaries_ and _limits_ , and guidelines. They make it clear that the work comes first and that there must be one smoothie break every day, with the smoothie-maker rotating daily and responsible for providing the ingredients of that day’s smoothie.”

“You really did say ‘smoothie’ three times, right? This isn’t a symptom of a brain tumor?”

“I did.” Chris sighs loudly, which Zach has learned means he’s done being a facetious twat. “The smoothie thing is true, and once Karl and I get Bob and Alex’s notes and really get to work on shit, _we’re going to fucking work on shit_ , okay? This is work. We really want to do this and we want it to be good — not just because if it’s anything but amazing you’ll dissolve into a simmering puddle of acid, but it’s professional pride and other phrases I never thought I’d say unironically.”

“I think I’m gonna cry again.”

“Cry to me, it’s okay.”

“How are you _the best_?”

“Wait until you see the script and then decide if we’re the best. Unless you mean ‘the best at being me’, in which case: tons of practice.”

Zach stays quiet for a few seconds, just listening to himself breathe and the expectant silence on the other end of the line. It’s comfortable. It’s nice. He could stay like this, draped in his desk chair and perfectly vacant, for way too long if he let himself.

“It’s just a set back, okay?” Chris says finally. “People are going to say no to you, try and get you to make unfair compromises, and generally be shitty, which they do _all the time_ , so don’t let it get to you. Just plow on through. Go make things.”

“Okay,” Zach says.

“By the way,” Chris adds. “This was just Simon. This was _Simon_ saying _no_ to you. Simon, who’s British and shit, and probably turned you down in the nicest way anyone could turn anyone else down for anything.”

“He was _so nice_ — that just made me want him more! God, he’s so fucking nice.” Zach turns a little in his chair and says, “Yeah, you’re right, where’s my thick skin when I need it?”

“Seriously! You’re Zachary Quinto! You eat people like Simon after you’ve ground them up and spread them on a crostini with goat cheese and avocado, all while telling people it’s _totally organic_ and smiling demonically.”

“You know me so well.”

“I know your penchant for Shakespearean dinner parties and human flesh and/or souls.”

“Yum, souls. Thanks for the pep talk.”

“No problem. Now leave me alone — Karl should be here soon and we have an elaborate Spanish brunch planned.”

“What the — no you don’t. You’re going to write in a dark room chained to a desk and you’ll like it.”

“Oh, totally, that’s what I meant. Bye, Zach.”

“I mean it! You better not enjoy yourself!”

Chris hangs up laughing, and his warm laugh that Zach hadn’t heard in months until just now echoes around in Zach’s head for a while.

*

The first two weeks of this producer gig fly by as Zach works with _all the fucking people in the fucking world_ (Bob and Alex and Damon and Chris and Karl and even Simon sends in exactly one email with a brief helpful note) to devise a development schedule — how long will it take the script to go from Bob and Alex’s outline to something resembling a shooting script, how long it’ll take Paramount to approve of it (roughly ten minutes judging by their recent game of Russian roulette that ended in pushing the movie back to December 2012), how long Zach will have to wait before he starts dropping casting descriptions for new supporting characters in the laps of agents who represent people he really wants to join them all in this clusterfuck.

_Here’s the thing about casting_ , Damon writes to all of them in a group email, cc’ing J.J. _You really only need one casting director, but it helps to have two: one who knows their shit and one who’s brand new so they approach everything from outside the box. How we run it is this: the green (as in rookie) director draws up the casting descriptions, contacts agents, runs auditions, that sort of thing, while the senior director actually makes things happen. Senior director has more connections, guides the rookie, blah blah blah._

_AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, ONLY TWO CASTING DIRECTORS_ , Alex replies almost immediately. _Too many cooks in the kitchen. You need to be able to keep them all under your thumb. Too many people with the word “director” in their title, they think they can gang up against you and do what they want and that is NOT the case. This is J.J’S SHOW, NO ONE ELSE’S. Casting directors are going under YOUR ORDERS, taken from the WRITER’S SCRIPT, following the PRODUCER’S VISION, not who they want to see in a movie or whose agent they owe a favor._

As expected, it goes like this: of the two casting directors from the first Trek, only the senior one is available to get back to work in August, which is great for Zach as he expected that finding a casting director with the right experience, connections, qualifications, and _je ne sais quois_ that the nerd triad wrote about would be fucking impossible and Zach was never intended to search for a senior casting director. He does have to find some visionary rookie to help him cast the couple of new characters that Bob and Alex intend to introduce, and so he considers his options from the rest of the cast.

The decision is made a little easier when Anton texts him one morning saying: _heard you’re producing and chris and karl are writing. not that you’d ask but I just want to act. please don’t call._

Zach’s a little hurt, but figures that Anton’s right. Anton is really fucking smart and dedicated, but honestly couldn’t give less of a shit about participating in the workings of movies, maybe because of the steady stream of pure acting jobs that still fall into his lap. That might change when he gets to be in his thirties, by which time he’ll have been seriously acting for _twenty years._ Zach thanks him for the text and really looks forward to plowing the kid with booze when they’re back on the lot again.

So Zach’s options are Zoe and John, and he goes with Zoe.

Her answer, like Anton’s, is short and sweet:

“Oh, _baby_. No!”

“But why not? I think you would do an amazing job and seriously, pre-production right now is a total sausage fest.”

There’s a moment’s pause and it’s in that moment when Jersey-Queens mouth-on-legs Zoe has _not responded_ to a question directed solely at her that Zach knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he has said The Wrong Thing.

“I didn’t —“ Zach begins, but that was what Zoe was waiting for and shit, he should have known this after almost 10 years of knowing her but he is still as fucking _stupid_ as the day he was born.

“You are so lucky that I love you like the brother I never had, so let me say this as nicely as I can: _no, Zach_ , I will not add that little flair of gender and ethnic diversity your fucking team needs to spice things up, but thank you for the offer and _you look like a fucking parrot_ , has someone told you that lately? Because _you look like a fucking parrot_.” 

“Oh thank god, yes please insult my hair and not the lackluster and insulting content of my character,” Zach pleads with a little too much sincerity. “I’m sorry, that was the wrong thing to say.”

“Yes, it was. Completely. Just make a note: when you call the next person on your list to offer them the job, _don’t_ say ‘I think you’d be good at it.’ If you thought they’d be bad at it, then you wouldn’t have called them. And _don’t_ tell them they made it to the final round thanks to affirmative action. How about pointing out _why_ they’d be so good on your team?”

“Can I tell you why you’d be so good on my team?”

“Baby, I can’t do it anyway — I’m filming some new shit with Bradley Cooper and then I have to do press for _Colombiana_ in August.” She instantly sweetens (as much as Zoe can around people she loves as much as Zach) and says, “But thank you of thinking of me. Maybe next time, okay? And for better reasons than _well, you don’t have a penis_.”

“Look, I’m sure it gets tiring for you to hear how amazing you are at every single thing you do, so I thought I’d go with an oldie but a goodie: the total fucking obvious and mildly demeaning.”

“Jumping on the backhanded compliment bandwagon, I see, that’s interesting. I’m glad I’m the only lady who has to fend off your advances.”

The nice part of Zoe ripping him a new asshole is that they usually spend an hour on the phone catching up afterwards, talking about their boyfriends and Bradley Cooper’s penis. The usual shit.

*

Jonathan has been in LA for a few days, auditioning for shit and visiting with more of their ex-boyfriends than Zach is strictly comfortable with. He would be upset, but reminds himself it’s the price of admission when he fell for the triple threat from Lancaster that Broadway had to adopt and viciously guard from outsiders.

“And Jesse said if I get to LA in November, they can fit me in for a thing on _Modern Family_ — one of the writers suggested I play Lily’s babysitter and induce a gay crisis in Haley’s boyfriend,” Jon says over breakfast-for-dinner the day he gets back. “And I wouldn’t have to sing or anything.”

“You say that like you hate singing,” Zach laughs.

“I’d like to be known for more,” Jon shrugs. “And of course I love singing. It’s God’s gift to me, Zach. I know that. I could never forget what He —”

“Stop, that’s creepy,” Zach whines. “You know I’m terrified that your latent Mennonitian tendencies might take over one day and I’ll wake up drugged in a church or something while you exorcise the gay out of me.”

“It’s one of those things I love about you,” Jon muses as he steals a strawberry from the 90th bowl of corn flakes Zach has had that month. “How instead of like, learning about the differences between Christian denominations, especially the one your boyfriend was raised in, you just draw on the melting pot of voodoo that’s been brewing in the back of your head since Catholic school.”

“And a few episodes of the _700 Club_ I watched when I was totally baked in college,” Zach adds. “That shit’s terrifying.”

Zach looks back to his corn flakes but glances up at Jonathan discreetly. He’s such a _guy_ sometimes, like the way he sits on a chair with his legs splayed open (compared to Zach, who backed up on his chair so he could pull his legs up and fold them in the lotus position as he ate his cereal — Christian and Bill told him every night during _Angels_ that _that’s not how men sit, Zach_ , further revising it to _that’s not how HUMANS SIT, ZACH_ when Zach pointed out he was completely damaged in the brain, thanks, and it had nothing to do with gender). Anyway, against his better judgement, he… likes Jonathan. He likes him even though Jon never went to college, doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life and doesn’t have much of a career plan, and then there’s that whole _raised on a farm_ thing and the cheated on his last boyfriend thing (okay that’s not a problem, it was just _interesting_ and then sad), and Jesus fucking _Christ_ the Lea Michele thing, god help him the next time he has to have a meal with her. 

Jonathan, meanwhile, has upped his donations to gay activism groups as a sort of silent atonement for pledging himself as out and visible but living in this _no comment on my personal life_ way while he’s with Zach.

They actually talked about it, for fuck’s sake, and agreed that this is nice for as long as it lasts.

“How’s the producing going?” Jon asks.

“I’m scared of calling John Cho,” Zach replies to his cereal.

“Uh, why? It’s John Cho. You guys are really good friends.”

“Yeah, but I… kind of put off asking him to do this casting thing until everyone else said no and he’s going to murder me because I waited this long to ask him to do anything at all, you know?”

Jon takes a bite of his bagel and looks at Zach like he’s sprouted six heads that spontaneously formed a chorus and began singing in ancient Greek.

“I don’t,” he says. “He’s your friend. He’ll understand.”

Zach grumbles and defiantly shovels more corn flakes into his mouth.

“Did you eat food besides cereal while I was gone?” Jon asks.

“I had sushi on Wednesday.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“I’m gonna call John.”

“If you don’t die from malnutrition on the way.”

“Ugh, go sing about it,” Zach says as he shoves his spoon in his mouth and leaves the table with his bowl and his phone.

Zach sits down in his desk chair and has a whole 20 seconds of staring at John’s phone number and eating his corn flakes before he hears Jonathan’s voice from the kitchen:

_Oh Zachary, I can’t fuck you if you’re dead_

_I literally can but our friends will intervene_

_Oh Zachary, you know what’s not a food group? Caffeine._

_How I wish you’d understand my concern_ — “Ooh, wait, worry works better.”

_How I wish you’d understand my worry_

_Tonight I’ll make you a bowl of curry!_

“Your syntax is shit and your rhymes are overly simplistic!” Zach calls back. “But I still like you! And I like curry!”

“Yay,” Jon replies.

*

He puts it off for another day and then calls John, who picks up after one and a half rings.

“DUDE,” John yells.

“Be my casting director?” Zach asks timidly. “Please?”

“FUCK YOU.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Seriously, you were going to ask _Anton_ before me?”

“I wasn’t! He texted _me_ and said he didn’t want to do anything!”

“Okay, that’s a little better. Still pissed, though. And I am a _huge_ nerd, why didn’t I get —“

“Too many cooks in the kitchen, but — casting director? Please?”

“George Takei _made a hash tag for me_. #WHYNOTJOHNCHO. Shit, man.”

“You know I don’t look at Twitter anymore,” Zach huffs. 

“This was months ago!” John shrieks. He sighs loudly and adds, “I want the casting director gig, but I’m filming this _Total Recall_ bullshit for the rest of the month — it’s not a big part, so I can do whatever prep work you need easily.”

“Yay,” Zach says.

“Oh god, what did you just say?”

“Nothing!” Zach shifts in his chair uncomfortably and remembers why he loves John but hates talking to him on the phone — conversations turn into an endless cycle of aggressive banter and he really needs a lot more coffee to be completely up on his game, like John _always is_. Seriously, if John Cho has ever had an off day, none of them have had the privilege of seeing it. “I’ll add you to the group emails, there’s just been a lot of bouncing ideas and suggestions back and forth so far. And I’ll get Chris and Karl to send you the outline they’re working from so you can get an idea of the characters you’ll be looking for. Then around August or so, you can start the casting process.”

“And their script will be done in July?”

“They’re plowing through a really rough draft right now for the end of the month and yeah, the script will be revised and J.J. and Paramount approved by the end of July. You’ll get all the drafts, so clear some time away for reading that.”

“There, man. Was that so fucking hard?”

“Stop yelling at me.”

“This is my indoor voice!”

“You are going to be the scariest casting director ever and I’m sorry I was stupid and waited this long to ask you,” Zach says all in one breath.

“Apology accepted. Just remember I’m always the best person for every job.”

“That can’t possibly be true.”

“Do it. I dare you. Think of one thing I’d suck at.”

“The priesthood. Anger management counseling. Accounting. Entomology. Pop music sensation. Classical music sensation.”

“To be fair, all of those things are terrible.”

“You’re super good at being John Cho.”

“ _Yay_ and _super good_ — who the fuck is this and how did you steal Zachary Quinto’s phone? He keeps better care of that than he does his dick. _What have you done with Zach’s dick_?” Zach is about to respond except John laughs, “It’s okay, when I first started going out with Kerri, I took up knitting for like, five minutes. Shit changes us.”

“That’s gross, John, don’t tell people that.”

“I’m just saying you’re adorable! Also, I’m bad at knitting, but that’s okay because there are definitely enough handmade baby blankets and tea cozys in the world for those who want them.”

“I definitely don’t want them. Ever.”

“Not even the five I got you for Christmas?”

“Oh my god, stop, can I hang up already? I have like, work to do!”

“Like work not _actual_ work, okay, I see how it is.”

“BYE, JOHN, and thanks for not murdering me.”

“BYE, ZACH, and the day is young.”

Zach ends the call and pushes his phone across his desk, briefly wondering whether he _does_ take better care of it than he does his dick and then deciding he needs a fucking mental health day after that harrowing phone call.

*

The Paramount people finally get back to Zach in a brief phone call that can be summed up as, “Out of the people J.J. mentioned for to head up development, we’re glad he picked you.” He doesn’t want to know how long J.J. had considered abandoning Trek to someone else, or who else he had suggested that had fucking _Paramount_ relieved he had gone with _Zach_ of all people, so he acts flattered and tries not to be terrified at the studio actually liking him.

Not liking him — no one actually _likes_ him — but thinking he’s a risk that will actually pay off and not completely crash the fucking project. That’s much more important than liking him.

He composes his first status report for J.J. He spends an entire afternoon on it, making sure he’s covered _everything_ , and that every sentence is as perfectly succinct as it could ever hope to be, that there’s no detail overlooked but no extraneous details that will force J.J. to skim and get bored as he’s reading it. He puts his questions in bold so that J.J. will actually fucking see them, some of them in all caps if they’re really important. He spends an hour debating whether he should copy the triad on it, and finally does.

He adds Chris on the bcc line, just so Chris knows where he is in case he needs to have a hysterical phone call later. Like Jonathan as he does, he doesn’t feel comfortable being completely fucking crazy around him yet. 

He adds John to the bcc line because Chris is the fucking _screenwriter_ and John is the fucking _casting director_ , that’s why they need to be copied on shit, not because they know his manpain better than anyone else. Fuck, how can he be so dumb and in charge of a billion-dollar pop culture touchstone?

J.J. takes 10 hours to reply and the response to his epic report is both relieving and terrifyingly underwhelming:

_Z —_

_THIS IS GREAT._

_Guys, answer his questions. If you’re wrong, I’ll correct you. Copy me on EVERYTHING. I am reading it all._

_I AM SO EXCITED FOR THIS MOVIE AGAIN._

_-JJ_

Zach reads the reply to Chris, who mirrors Zach’s reaction:

“ _What the fuck_?” he asks as he laughs.

“I know, right?” Zach asks.

Zach leans back in his desk chair and says, “So my work for the time being is kind of done — we have a development schedule and now we just need the script. Is it going okay?”

“I think so,” Chris says. “Karl and I have developed this strategy of ‘if it’s boring, cut it.’”

“That’s a good strategy.”

“We’re going to need Bob and Alex to look it over at some point, though — like, we think it’s good so far, but it doesn’t have a lot of those memorable lines from the first one, you know? The dialogue’s not _bad ass_ enough.”

“Talk it out,” Zach replies. “Like, it’s hard sitting there and trying to find your bad ass self, so like, act out what you want to happen and what you want to say.”

“…I hate how brilliant that is. I think I’ve been doing that when Karl isn’t here, and then I stop talking out loud to myself because I look like a crazy person.”

“Fuck that! If being crazy is going to generate a kick ass script, then go crazy!”

“What are you gonna do in the meantime?” Chris asks. “While we write the script?”

“Umm, in the meantime, I have a little part in a friend’s movie in Brooklyn. Like, in my ten minutes of free time. And then it’s back to spreading this development schedule around, getting back everyone from the first movie, like costume designers and art designers and shit, and seriously Chris, if —“

“No more threats, Zach — it’s going to get done. Promise, okay? I promise.”

“Yeah,” Zach replies. “Um, I’m gonna let you go so you can get to it — call or text or email or video chat or anything, okay? No problem too small! I’ll help you through anything and everything!”

“When are you coming back to LA? _Are_ you coming back to LA?”

Zach adjusts his grip on the phone, unconsciously tightening and running his thumbs over the sides, and finally says, “I’ll let you know. So far I haven’t been summoned and I have a lot to take care of here.”

“Yup, got it. Later.”

“Wait, Chris —?“

“Yeah?”

Zach grins into the phone, unbelievably genuine, and says, “Remember, the script has to be _good_ , okay, like, I’m not gonna put on the Spock ears just because you wrote it.”

“Uh, no, you’re going to put them on because you sold your soul to Paramount and you _have_ to do what they say until you die.”

“I could fight it.”

“You couldn’t fight a cold with my mom’s chicken soup and boxing gloves made of antibiotics.”

“Well, no one could; antibiotics don’t fight the common cold.”

Chris sighs a loud, hard, long-suffering sigh and hangs up on Zach, who puts his phone aside and leans back in his desk chair a little, grinning for all the world.

Jonathan pokes his head into the room and whistles at him. “Hey.”

Zach spins around in his chair and grins again. “Hey hey hey. You just get in?”

“I did, but I didn’t want to disturb whatever was made that mad scientist cackle happen.”

He’s warm all over, settled for the first time in a while, like shit is going places, real things are happening — he can have an actual impact on this next movie. His fingerprints will be on it, too, not just J.J.’s. His eyes meet Jon’s and Jon’s whole face lights up — he thinks they’re mirroring each other, dares to think that maybe he looks that happy for once (for _once_ ). 

“Think you’ve earned dinner?” Jon asks. “I’m starving. Walked all over town with the guys — Christian said something about meeting him for dinner.”

Zach ignores that Jon’s use of “the guys” actually means “a pack of multitalented screaming singing Broadway queens” and gets out of his chair, nodding his agreement. “Sounds great,” he adds as he suddenly and randomly wraps his arms around Jonathan. “I love some Borle-induced indigestion with my meals. Let’s go.”


	3. Writing -- Silver Lake -- July/August 2011

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two large chunks of this chapter are in screenplay format -- at least, they were on Scrivener. The export/import process wasn't entirely successful, but it's still readable.

  
(art by [maggie2mw](http://maggie2mw.livejournal.com/21229.html))

When Zach tells Chris he can audition to write the script for the Trek sequel, Chris pulls his phone away so he can look at the time. It’s about 11:15 on a Saturday night and by nerd standards, that’s practically _brunch_. The second he hangs up with Zach, Chris digs up Bob Orci’s number from somewhere in the depths of his contacts.

As predicted, Bob is awake and totally _not_ unwinding with some kind of beer-and-fueled RPG alongside a bunch of showrunners in LA, and loudly announces that they should keep going without him while he takes a call from _Captain Kirk_.

It’s still a little too much fun, Chris thinks as he smirks on his end of the line.

“So what’s up? J.J. said he’d call you about his offer to Z. and the producing thing — this isn’t like, ego drama, why wasn’t it me, blah blah blah, right?”

“Oh, no, totally not — I mean, related to that, but — okay, Zach is letting me audition to write the script, so I need to send him ten pages on Wednesday.”

“Okay…”

“And you mentioned a couple of times how you were working on incorporating original series characters, right? So… could you tell me who and I’ll base my ten pages on that? Just so I don’t waste time and drive myself crazy digging ten pages out of my _soul_ that we can’t use anyway because it’s not in your master plan.”

Bob wavers for two seconds and then says, “Yeah, okay. Gary Mitchell.”

“Uh huh.”

“You have no idea who that is.”

“I’ll let you tell me.”

Chris can hear the background on Bob’s line getting fainter and then he hears the distant click of a door closing. His stomach turns a little in anticipation because whatever it is, it has to be from the actual outline and all this top secret plot development bullshit — Chris can’t help think that he is _such_ a fucking shoe-in for this thing.

“So Gary Mitchell was in the second original series pilot — the first had Pike, Number One, and Spock, and the second had Kirk, Spock, and Kirk’s best friend, Gary Mitchell. No McCoy, for some reason, just some old guy who didn’t do much and was too old to be much fun like McCoy got to be.”

“Not cranky and Southern either, I take it?”

“Exactly! Gotta have the cranky Southern element in your space opera or what’s the point? Digressing. Right. So Kirk and Spock are close already, but Gary is Kirk’s friend from the Academy — it’s even kind of implied that Gary’s the guy who introduced Kirk to his baby mama, but that’s like, movie territory, so don’t worry about that.”

As Bob was talking, Chris sat down at his computer and typed “Gary Mitchell” into the browser search — strangely enough, the _Star Trek_ Gary Mitchell was the first to come up, as if no one had named their child Gary Mitchell in the past 40+ years, or if they had, said kid hadn’t done anything to dethrone the original Gary Mitchell from search engine prominence.

“Yeah, I’ve got his wikipedia page open. What were you guys going to do with him?”

“Well, I can’t give it all away and basically help you _cheat_ and get the fucking thing, so I’ll just tell you what to write.”

Chris isn’t about to dispute the fairness of that at all, so he listens.

“All I’ve told you is that we wanted to include Gary Mitchell in the movie and that he and Kirk are supposed to be best friends. _But_ , in the interest of saving time and shit, Alex and I didn’t include him in the first movie. So what if you write the scene where he and Kirk catch up? How much did Zach give you? Five, ten pages?”

“Ten.”

“Right, so you have ten minutes including description to catch your best friend up on the events of the past year or so and the whole last movie, _and_ to find out what he’s been doing.”

“Yeah, has to be a two-way street or otherwise it’s just an info dump and I’m bored just thinking about it.”

“Awesome — don’t send it my way, just send it straight to Zach, or I’ll be tempted to fix it up and help you cheat and that’s not until later.”

“I appreciate the help, Bob. I’ll try not to suck at this.”

“Do your best — anyway, no one’s expecting you to be good at anything besides push ups.”

“Ugh, know what? Fuck John Cho.”

“Who wouldn’t? Anyway, I gotta get back to game night. Feel like coming over? Plenty of beer and there’s always time to create a character, if you don’t have one already!“

“Oh, uh… thanks but no thanks. Apparently, I’ve got some writing to do.”

They laugh and say their goodbyes. Chris hangs up and allows himself a full-body shudder before he throws his phone back on the bed and opens up the obligatory actors’ edition of Final Draft, moving it alongside his browser window that’s full of Gary Mitchell.

*

> GARY  
>  Man, and I was worried that leaving you in McCoy’s clutches for a year would, I don’t know, end with you in a straightjacket or sporting his cute little scowl.
> 
> Kirk and Gary rush out and overlap their best McCoy impressions — scowls, glares, eyebrows, and “Dammit”s. 
> 
> KIRK  
>  It was a good year -- quiet as hell without you, but I did okay for myself.
> 
> GARY  
>  (laughs)  
>  Yeah, I'll say, _Captain_.
> 
> Kirk laughs, too, and tries not to look too proud, or smug, or guilty at how proud and smug he feels, but it's impossible -- he's here with one of his best friends that he hasn't seen in so long, and all he can do is laugh.
> 
> KIRK  
>  I'm serious! Even before the whole...
> 
> Suddenly, he's at a loss for words: remembering Vulcan's destruction and how he came across this captaincy in the first place.
> 
> KIRK (CONT'D)  
>  Everything. The Battle of Vulcan. Everything.
> 
> It's still fresh to both of them. A BEAT where they don't look at each other, don't speak, just reflect.
> 
> KIRK (CONT'D)  
>  Before that, I was so put together. Long-term girlfriend -- remember Gaila? Red hair? She was in our Beginning Klingon class our second year.
> 
> GARY  
>  (skeptical)  
>  _Gaila_? Long-term? Are we talking minutes or hours here?
> 
> KIRK  
>  (huffs, totally offended)  
>  A whole _month_ , that's --  
>  (sheepish)  
>  Okay, and then I kind of used her to cheat on the _Kobayashi Maru_ test, but --
> 
> GARY  
>  (still skeptical)  
>  And that's why Spock's been in there with the admirals for...   
>  (glances at a timepiece somewhere)  
>  Two hours now? And counting?
> 
> KIRK  
>  (sighs)  
>  It's kind of a long story.
> 
> GARY  
>  (looks to his beer and downs the rest of it)  
>  I'll get another beer. You... Make your story short and... Well, just short, huh?
> 
> KIRK  
>  Okay, ten words: I hacked the test. Spock pressed charges. We saved Earth.
> 
> GARY  
>  (counting to himself)  
>  Damn, that's ten all right. And to think I had to go through a thousand pages of reports to get as much out of Starfleet. Never mind all the news coverage with so little actual news.  
>  (switches to his largest, saddest, most pathetic eyes)  
>  Did you know you were a child born of tragedy, Jim?
> 
> Something's changed in Kirk's demeanor -- he can't just laugh this off, not yet. Not when he was _there_ and Gary wasn't even in the same quadrant. Kirk looks into his drink and says, more to himself than Gary:
> 
> KIRK  
>  We did it in 36 hours. That's all it took -- to go from the kid who cheated to the guy who saved Earth.
> 
> Kirk looks distracted from his thoughts and looks back to Gary.
> 
> KIRK (CONT'D)  
>  And you? How'd you get through it? Ten words or less.
> 
> GARY  
>  (considers)  
>  Hmm. Ten words: Romulan interference. Info blackout. Field promotion: Captain.
> 
> Gary considers his last words for a moment and adds:
> 
> GARY (CONT'D)  
>  Worried about friends.
> 
> That's it -- Kirk seems to shake it off and smiles at him. 
> 
> KIRK  
>  Shut it, Captain Mitchell -- we're all good now.
> 
> GARY  
>  Yeah, Captain Kirk, but you're out exploring. What am I doing -- teaching new cadets? Didn't I just _finish_ school? Shouldn't I be doing more?
> 
> Kirk looks worried again and can't meet Gary's face. He knows the question he has to ask -- they both do -- but he can't bring himself to ask it.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (quietly)  
>  If they decide against me -- if they demote me or --
> 
> GARY  
>  I'll fight it. Tooth and nail, I promise. This thing is total crap, not just because you're my friend, but because you couldn't have gone through the Battle of Vulcan without it changing you. Taking away the _Enterprise_? It's like saying it never happened. That you didn't do you part, or that it could have been anyone.  
>  (a beat)  
>  I couldn't have done everything you did -- it had to be you, and it had to be Spock.
> 
> Kirk reaches out and grabs Gary’s shoulder, grinning.
> 
> KIRK  
>  I forgot how good it felt to have someone on _my_ side for a change! All Bones and Spock do is judge, judge, judge.
> 
> GARY  
>  I can't speak for Spock, but that's what Len's good at. Is it time for another chorus of DAMMIT, JIM's?
> 
> KIRK  
>  When is it _not_?
> 
> GARY  
>  Seriously, it never gets old.

*

Chris finishes his ten pages in about a day, and then spends the rest of the time before Zach’s deadline tinkering with the details, running it over like an actor and yelling at himself in his living room, going over and over and _over_ the lines to see if they’re really the best he can do, and if the actor who would play Gary Mitchell would read that part of the script and vomit all over their agent before shrieking, “YEAH, I know it’s _Star Trek_ , but I’ve changed my mind! Fuck _this_ shit.”

He wakes up from an exhausted stress nap to an old episode of _Supernatural_ on TV and thinks that the television and the universe have sent that angel in the trench coat who looks just like the _Original Series_ Gary Mitchell as a harbinger of his certain suckitude.

Thursday, Zach writes back to his submission: “Waiting for one more sample to review, but the others suck. We’re the only hipsters who can do _Trek_. Anyway, barring this last guy channeling Fitzgerald or  Woolf and sending me the next cultural touchstone of our generation — well, we’ll see.”

“BE MORE VAGUE,” Chris yells at his laptop. He would call Zach and yell, but that would give both of them too much satisfaction. Instead, Chris curses as he composes his perfectly polite reply (to compensate for his introduction letter addressed TO WHOM IT MAY BUTTS): _I’m just glad to have had the chance! This was a lot of fun! I think_

“KILL YOURSELF,” Chris yells at his himself mid-sentence.

He finally decides to take his mom’s advice and just being himself within the confines of social acceptability in varying degrees according to intimacy. He and Zach have fucked each other, so Zach deserves a little sarcasm with just a pinch of absurdity thrown in — basically, like his first email, but with the crazy toned down just a smidgen. Like every conversation he’s ever had with Zach. Chris decides on: _Here’s hoping I’m still the most talented person you will ever meet! Seriously, how can anyone top this? They CAN’T. So gimme gimme._

Zach relents in a caps locked missive that makes Chris’s eyes hurt, but also has him dancing around his apartment with an extra wiggle in his hips that’s usually reserved for… actually, he can’t remember what it’s for, so maybe it should be the professional success wiggle.

*

When Zach talks to him about getting Karl to help him with the script, he says it so fucking _easily_ like Chris can just _call Karl_ and demand he come over and help him write. 

For Zach’s sake, Chris fuels that impression because lately, Zach has this high tightness in his voice that suggests a mental break approaches, like he’s never actually worked this hard or something. He (nicely) tells Zach at some point to suck it up, bitch, because isn’t this what Carnegie Mellon trained him for, running an entire production from the ground up and all that? So Zach whines something about the personal nature of theater and Chris hangs up on him after Zach ignores all the gagging noises Chris is making on his side of the line.

Actually calling Karl, who _is_ in LA, and _is_ a giant fucking Trek freak, and _would_ probably know how to help him… Chris sighs and picks up his phone.

“Are you busy?” Chris asks when Karl picks up.

“Uh, define busy.”

“Can you come over and help me write the script for the next Trek movie based on Bob and Alex’s notes?”

“Hmm,” Karl says (HMM. THAT’S ALL. JUST _HMM_. LIKE CHRIS HAS ASKED HIM TO PLAY SQUASH OR SOMETHING. WHAT IS EVERYONE’S PROBLEM WITH BEING NORMAL?). “Yeah, okay.”

Oh, Chris thinks. That _was_ easy.

“Awesome, uh, I’m at my place. I just got the master plan from Bob and Alex. So. Come over? Please? Come over? Let’s do this?”

“Sure, be there in a bit.”

“A bit” apparently translates to “less than an hour”, so Chris is looking around his apartment, satisfied with his mild amounts of organizing and cleaning when he hears a buzzer and lets Karl in.

The organizing was for naught because Karl yells something that sounds like “AAAAAAGGGHHHHH” when Chris opens the door.

“Sorry about the mess,” Chris says. “Don’t you think that’s a little —“

“CHRIS. There’s a RACCOON on your face, hasn’t anyone _told you_?!”

Chris rubs a hand down the side of his face and grasps the bit of beard he can. Karl reaches out like he can’t believe it and does the same — runs his hand down the other side of Chris’s face and grasps the beard he can.

“It’s… growing out of you…” Karl says with his voice full of wonder.

“Uh, that’s how beards work,” Chris says. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know, honestly,” Karl says. His voice is shaky and Chris has to raise his eyebrow because he’s not sure he’s ever seen Karl like, _act_ as well as he’s doing now, but he’ll play along. 

He lets Karl in, but Karl turns around with his iPhone in hand and says, “Hold still, Sasquatch.”

Chris closes the door and poses with his hand still on the doorknob. “Who are you sending this to?” he asks. “You’re not on Twitter, are you?”

“Oh no, this is purely personal between us and our co-stars, I promise you that,” Karl assures him. He works on his phone for a few seconds, puts it away, and rests a backpack on the floor by his feet. “So where’s the script?”

“It’s just Alex and Bob’s notes right now,” Chris says. He leads Karl over to the laptop where the notes are open on the screen. Karl sits down, reads for a second, and emits a piercing _shriek_ from somewhere in his throat-chest-mouth area that has Chris tilting his head corgi-style and wondering if he’s gone into full-blown hallucinations and shit. He supposes if Karl grows vampire teeth or something, then that’s probably a definite YES, but for now it’s just Karl being a complete and utter geek about some shit.

Karl takes his phone out of his pocket again and lays it on the table. Chris takes it as a silent invitation to read the messages that are steadily arriving for him.

ANTON: that’s a fine beard, sir.

Chris beams a little and replies with a quick, “Thanks man Karl doesn’t get it.”

SIMON: Oh, Chris. Why didn’t you tell me you had converted to Orthodox Judaism and found yourself a wife? I… would have done nothing. Mazal tov.

ZOE: hahahahahahahahahahahaha CHRIS STOP IT

JOHN: Mr. Pine, tear down that beard. Seriously. Burn it. Burn it with fire.

As Chris is replying with a sad face to each text, Zach sends a photo of himself and _his_ beard from a month or two back. “we’re beard brothers. leave chris alone!!!!!”

Chris grins and replies, “See this is why you’re my favorite -C.” He forwards the photo to his own phone, just to have it.

Karl is still reading, completely engrossed and lost to the world, so Chris takes a quick photo of him hunched over the laptop, his arm draped on his thigh so his hand is hanging somewhere between his legs. He sends this to everyone with the message: “This is Chris. Please tell me how the script is going to get written when Karl is like this.”

No one can top Simon’s reply, “Shh, just let it happen.”

“Forwarding this to myself,” Karl says slowly. “And getting out my laptop, and _CHRIS THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEST MOVIE EVER_.”

Chris puts Karl’s phone down like he wasn’t using it the whole time and asks, “Did you say ‘best movie ever’ or — something else — because your accent got really crazy thick in there and —“

“Hush, shut up, what are these sample pages Bob talked about in his email? Give me everything. All the things, Christopher, give them now.”

Chris takes his laptop back and rearranges his camp across the table from Karl. As he sends Karl things, he watches from the periphery as Karl unzips the backpack he subtly carried in and begins to unpack: a monster-sized laptop that powers up immediately, all three _Original Series_ box sets, the complete box set of the movies, the two-disc edition of _their_ Trek movie, and a box of energy bars. 

“I hope you don’t have a port-a-potty in there, too, because the bathroom’s right down the hall,” Chris says.

Karl yanks a thermos and a water bottle out of the backpack, too, and kind of points his eyebrows at them. “When they’re empty…”

“Not in my house, buddy,” Chris warns.

“Okay, I think I’ve got everything,” Karl announces. Chris glances over at the 90% of the table Karl has invaded and then looks at Karl.

“Think so? We could go to Costco and get you _more_ shit. Speaking of which.” Chris thinks he knows the answer to this already, but he doesn’t want to hear it, yet he also does? He’s thinking and feeling a lot of things at the moment. “How’d you know to come ready to move in and not leave my place for, oh, 10-hour stretches at a time?”

“I’ve been praying for this day, Chris,” Karl says very seriously. He leans across the table and reaches one long arm out so his hand can grasp Chris’s forearm tightly, Karl’s eyes boring deep into Chris’s. “For the day when you’d just — call me and say, come over, never leave, just be with me and together, we can _write the Trek script_. Which is what you call rimming, right?”

“You need all six _Star Trek_ movies playing while getting rimmed?” Chris asks as he looks over all of Karl’s stuff. “I’m so worried about your family. _So_ worried.”

“Zach certainly didn’t call and suggest I might want to free up my schedule because I could be of some help to you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Karl says as he lets go of Chris and turns back to his laptop. “I didn’t look at all the notes — what are the three episodes the script is based on?”

“Episodes?” Chris asks as he snaps back to reality (writing the screenplay for _Star Trek XII: The One with Chris Isn’t Really Sure Yet_ ) from his brief nightmare (Karl melting into his couch as he watches _Wrath of Khan_ and jacks himself off why why why is his brain doing this.) 

“Yeah, the first third is based on “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, but what about the others? Episode titles, please, or vague descriptions.”

“Thankfully, they split them up into folders,” Chris says as he glances at his screen. “Okay, second part is an episode called “Balance of Terror”? Make any —“

“Perfect sense, great wartime commentary then and now,” Karl replies.

“Um, okay. And the last is “Bread and Circuses.””

“This is so perfect,” Karl says as he types away happily. “That’s a fun one to end on. The rest of the crew gets to save the day and you, me, and Zach will be homoerotically musing in prison. _Actually_ , Spock and McCoy get to know each other better in prison while Kirk is off fucking a slave girl — I am _not joking_ , this is an _actual plot point_.”

“I can’t fucking believe this shit sometimes, you know?”

“I know, it’s so great."

They get down to the business of reading the notes. Chris glances over the edge of his laptop once in a while and watches Karl lean against his hand, completely engrossed in what’s on his screen, his eyes wide enough to devour his laptop whole. Chris has to look away and back to his screen, and tries not to think about how Karl seems to feel levels of magic and wonder that Chris hasn’t even heard of, never mind experienced, just through some notes on an electronic page. Suddenly, he’s glad Zach pushed Karl to come over and that Chris actually called, since hopefully having Karl around will inject some of that wonder into whatever he writes.

*

What sucks royally about inheriting an outline for a project and then being expected to just “fill in the gaps” is that one can’t just dive into that project and pop out with a coherent end result, gaps filled and smoothed, even faster than the outline was developed. No, on the contrary — Chris spends a lot of June lying to Zach and saying he and Karl are writing and making progress. In fact, what they’re doing is swimming through Bob and Alex’s story notes, trying to make a skeleton or _something_ out of it all. No, the skeleton is there, but it’s of Bob and Alex’s design for a body they imagined — they have to make all the ideas their own. It’s one thing to read 10 pages on how Gary Mitchell isn’t the anti-Kirk but also isn’t a perfected, ideal Kirk, but it’s another thing to understand what the _fuck_ the original writers meant by that and translate it into a story with scenes and dialogue other people can understand.

Chris and Karl are into their third rewatch of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” in two days. They’ve taken to sitting in the middle of Chris’s living room floor to watch episodes, noses up at the television, Karl following along with the episode on some transcript site and murmuring, “yes, of course” to himself.

Chris just… absorbs and absorbs, glances at the story notes for this section, tries to grasp what he’s supposed to do with this, what fucking _story_ they’re going to pull out and adopt for their universe.

“He’s not evil,” Chris says during the episode coda.

“It ends on a fucking _joke_ ,” Karl murmurs to himself as he types something else on his laptop. “His best friend has just become a superman, lost his mind, tried to kill him, and he _makes a joke_. What the _fuck_? Jim Kirk, you are so broken in every universe.”

“Whatever, it’s a joke looking to the future, people deal, but _he’s not evil_ ,” Chris says slowly. “I mean, he’s kind of a smarmy dick if he’s anything, and then he loses his mind. I wanna do more with pre-crazy Gary Mitchell. He’s not going to go crazy in our script. I get what they mean, though, about Gary being the anti-Kirk but not? He’s… smarter, like, maybe not book smarter, but he’s… not worried about doing the morally right thing. Smarter about the world and how it works.”

Karl considers it and lies down on the floor, flips onto his back, listens to Chris talk. Chris barely notices and skips back to the scene in the episode he’s thinking about.

“When he’s talking about the Academy, right, and says that Kirk’s class was too hard so he introduced Kirk to that girl — like, who _does that_ except someone who totally knows more about the system and how to work it?” He pauses the DVD on that scene, but he doesn’t have to rewatch it. Chris looks down at Karl, who’s watching him carefully and smiling a little, that _ha, now you’re a fucking nerd like the rest of us, NERD_ smile that makes Chris roll his eyes. “How do we put that in the script?”

“Honestly, I don’t know if the movie-going public is ready for that kind of amorality, or if we could cram that into a 40-minute third of a movie where Spock also has to be deposed on what a fuck up Kirk _isn’t_ ,” Karl replies. “Never mind that I don’t think it fits in with the rest of the story — the story of this section, I mean.”

They stay quiet and consider everything for several long minutes before Karl gets up and ruffles Chris’s hair. “Come on, take me to that coffee place you swear by. We need a break.”

“Okay, but put on a bigger hat because Zach has a Google alert on me and if photos of us pop up going to get coffee he will totally fire us both,” Chris says as he reluctantly gets up from that one spot on his floor that he’s convinced has magical properties since it brought him this kind of breakthrough.

“You two are _psychotic_ , I mean certifiably fucking _nuts_ ,” Karl says as he puts on his sunglasses and risks the wrath of Zach to go outside hatless. “I’m glad we’re doing this with three thousand miles between the two of you — god help us all if he was three blocks away and could just run over with his dog every hour and devour your face.”

“It’d be exactly like that,” Chris says as he gets up and goes for his shoes. “Noah would run in and lick my face all over, and then Zach would slice it off and eat it.”

“Gross. Come on,” Karl says once Chris has his shoes on. He pulls him by the arm out the door, muttering calming things about how they’re going to spend a nice long hour drinking caffeine or cold drinks and not thinking about anything more strenuous than the cuteness of puppies.

*

“But labs become the ugliest dogs!” Chris shrieks as they walk back into his apartment and Karl closes the door behind them. “I mean, not ugly, just _boring_.”

“That doesn’t invalidate their cute puppy status — in fact, I’d even say it’s a point in their favor, as they blow all their cute when they’re young and then go the rest of their lives being perfectly average.”

“Am I a lab, Karl?” Chris asks, trying to turn the tiny bit of honest, true terror he feels at the thought into irony or something. “Are my adorable years over?”

…Maybe that’s laying it on too thick/truthfully.

“Oh no, you’re much better looking now. I am, too. Anton, I think he’s going to decompose in a few years, or ruin his face with surgery to keep that Anton-ness fresh once he starts to turn into an adult.”

“Don’t say that about our friend,” Chris protests. “That’s the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Poor Anton.”

“Okay,” Karl says as he picks up his laptop from the floor where they left it after their quick viewing session. “So let’s review the Gary Mitchell section.”

“Hold on, let me remember my big revelation about him,” Chris says, and he tries to not feel quite so stupid as he closes his eyes and really does try to get back into that space where this character just made perfect and complete — “Okay, got it. So what have we got so far?”

“Well, we haven’t got anything but notes, but here’s the scene-by-scene, I suppose. Is this a storyboard? Is that what the cool kids are calling it these days?”

“I don’t know, I probably have a screenwriting book somewhere,” Chris says as he glances around at the one bookshelf in his living room. “Probably not in here. These are my _welcome to my apartment, please notice how well-read I am and now let’s have sex on the couch_ books.”

“…Ew,” Karl says as he glances around the room and his eyes alight on every single thing in it with a newfound distaste. Chris grins at Karl’s shuddering and then sits down at the dining room table at his laptop/writing camp. “Okay, so. Close on a pair of command gold shoulders…”

“Okay, not that much detail and seriously, we haven’t planned that far yet! No details yet,” Chris says with a little wave. “Just the scenes, okay?” 

“But what do you think of starting like that? A Kirk fake out because an audience will think it’s you walking down the hall in a dress uniform, and then BAM — it’s Gary. Just further emphasizes the parallels between them.”

“…Yeah, I fucking love it, shut up, let’s keep going,” Chris says.

“So Gary walks into this admiral’s office —“

“Admiral Backstory,” Chris adds.

“Shut up. And says that he’s glad he’s back on Earth, so glad he’ll be teaching command bullshit 101 or whatever, and then mentions the _Enterprise_ is up for its six-month review and lucky thing, it’ll be docking at the Earth spacedock.”

“Is that really what it’s called?”

“It’s called _Does that really fucking matter right now, Chris, would you please shut up and focus_ ,” Karl replies. “And then the admiral says, I think you’re much more qualified to be the _Enterprise_ captain than this fuck-up we promoted because things were just _so crazy_ then —“

Chris thinks it sounds like the “plot” of _Princess Diaries 2_ , but he could also just be imagining that since he spent most of that shoot drinking with Anne Hathaway so they wouldn’t be nervous blabbering fuck ups in front of Julie goddamn Andrews and John Rhys-Davies. He’s watched the movie once since he was forced to sit through it at the premiere and thinks that Anne wears trashed much better than he does — between the heavy hair, the contacts, the beer, the random musical interludes, and the general sense of not giving a fuck, he looks goddamned _wasted_ , especially when he’s supposed to be totally in love with Anne and fingering her mouth or whatever — wait, did that actually happen _in the movie_? Did _he put on an accent_ for that movie? 

“You zoned out, didn’t you? I asked you something — did you hear me?”

“What, no, keep going,” Chris says. “Want a beer? I need a beer.”

“Whatever. Okay, and then… how does Gary react?” Karl asks.

Chris pulls a beer out of his fridge and pops the top off, thinking out loud as he does it. “He’s smarter than Jim,” Chris says as he stands in his kitchen and makes sure he’s loud enough for Karl to hear. “Jim would be all, raaa you can’t do this I’ve been a great captain, and totally lose his shit, but Gary knows that’s not how you get bureaucrats to do what you want.”

“Also, at this point, we don’t _know_ Gary, so we should make it ambiguous,” Karl adds. 

“Right, so his reaction should be… a little hesitation, a little nod, and a sharp little _fine_ or something. Let the admiral run his review and know what? If Jim is as good as he is, he’ll keep his position and if he’s fucked up somehow, then Gary can step in.”

“And remember your scene in the bar,” Karl reminds him. “Gary does care about him and says he would fight it. So he’d step in if Jim has majorly fucked up, but Gary knows him and knows that when Jim Kirk fucks up, _he fucks up_ , and there probably won’t be a ship left to captain.”

Chris walks back into the dining room from the kitchen and raises an eyebrow at Karl. It dawns on him, very suddenly, that Karl has probably written _Star Trek_ fan fiction at an embarrassingly old age, and that’s where all these _insights_ are coming from. Karl looks up at Chris as if he can hear his thoughts and Chris just smiles kindly before continuing their conversation.

“Okay, so half of the forty minutes are these scenes,” Chris says. “Gary and that admiral, then everyone in front of the review board and the stakes being laid out, maybe one scene where Jim did fuck up while he was captain and defends it, then Gary and Jim go to the bar and catch up —“

“And Spock’s little deposition.”

“Am I a sick fuck for wanting to write that _so badly_?” Chris asks as he drapes himself over a chair in the dining room next to Karl. “Like, I wrote that Spock was being deposed _forever_ , right, testifying to how Jim wasn’t a fuck up, but then we cut to the end of all that where Spock’s had enough and is like, we’re done here. Jim is amazing, and the longer you make me sit here and try to find a way in which he hasn’t grown into the best captain I’ve ever served under —“

“Better than Pike who has to be sitting right there and has to say something sassy at that point?” Karl asks.

“Yes oh my god write that down,” Chris says excitedly. “And then Spock is like, whatever. We’re done. I’ve told you everything you need to know, and if you remove Jim from this post, you’re fucking morons.” Chris takes a drink and looks at Karl. He can feel himself grinning, the excitement almost brimming over. “I kind of can’t wait to see Zach do it. You know, see _how_ he does that. I watched the movie again a few days ago and it’s just insane how Zach controls every inch of his face and body, and writing this where he has to do that but also quietly _lose his shit_ is — I really can’t wait. It’ll be like that choking scene but I won’t have to be choked this time.”

“If you could get away with writing another choking scene with Zach, you would do it in a second,” Karl scoffs.

“…Amok Time,” Chris says.

“NO.”

Chris laughs forever while Karl tries, so valiantly, to get their think tank back on track, but it’s no fucking use — they’re going to need bigger beers.

*

It’s almost one on a Friday night/Saturday morning and Chris can’t ignore the singing and buzzing show his phone is putting on six inches from his head. He grabs the phone and slips out of bed so as not to disturb Duncan, his — what does one call a one-night-stand that’s repeated at irregular intervals? It can’t be friends with benefits because he doesn’t quite consider Duncan a friend. Is the line knowing someone’s last name? He thinks he saw something like King or Krane on his credit card at dinner a week or so back. Shit, is letting someone buy him _dinner_ the line? Maybe giving a shit is the line in which case, there’s no line at all.

Wait, maybe the line is shaving because he needed to get laid and Duncan had seen photos of his beard online and honestly, _honestly_ said, “Shave or no dice,” which — Chris hopes that doesn’t give him the wrong impression. He was going to shave _anyway_ , but sex was as good a nudge as any to shave. It wasn’t _for Duncan_ , it was for him.

Fuck, that better not lead to a _talk_.

“Is someone dead?” Chris hisses at Zach.

He leaves his bedroom, then peeks back inside — so that’s what Duncan’s dead-to-the-world sprawl looks like, and it’s not bad. He’s hot, in that very tanned, really cares about having well-sculpted muscles and perfectly styled hair way. Yeah, Chris thinks, this guy’s attractive in that way where he carefully followed the steps to Los Angelean attractiveness and followed them to the letter. The result is adequate attractiveness and maybe that’s why Chris doesn’t care. It’s not breathtaking, it’s not flawed, it’s not something he doesn’t see every ten feet on the street: it’s just okay. Chris shakes his head to clear it and leaves, heads to his living room and the couch.

“What if someone was, huh?” Zach babbles in his ear, all nasal, flawed, irritating. “And that’s how you oh-so-sensitively pick up the phone? And then I have to be all, _yeah Chris, someone died, two guesses who_.”

“Oh fuck, did someone die, Zach?” Chris asks seriously.

“No, I was just fucking with you. What’s up?”

“Uh,” Chris says. “You’re making a social call at _4 AM_ your time. Or are you here — on this coast, I mean? Where are you calling from? _Is it from inside the house_?”

“Mmm, I’m in New York. Couldn’t sleep.”

“So you call me? Do I put you to sleep?”

“What is _wrong_ with you? I just wanted to talk and catch up, maybe _not_ talk about our nerdy work shit for once.” 

Chris sits down on his couch but it instantly feels wrong. He grabs a blanket and arranges shit so he’s lying down and curled up, comfortable once more. Something about the combination of catching up with a close friend, no real commitments demanding his attention in the morning, this couch in the middle of a silent night being _way_ too welcoming, but not in a falling-asleep kind of way. “Okay,” Chris says, the word packed nicely in a contented sigh. “Let’s talk. How… how was your night? What’d you do?”

“I think that’s why I can’t sleep,” Zach sighs — different than Chris’s, a little annoyed with a slight growl underneath it all. “Spent it in, watching movies, fell asleep on the couch, woke up a little while ago.”

“Couches, man. They do that. Suck you in with their comfort, next thing you know, Karl is suffocating you with a pillow and you’re kicking him in the balls.”

“And then you go to your dining room table and write the next Oscar-winning screenplay. That’s a great story, Chris, I’m so glad I heard it. I love the ending especially.”

“But you said,” Chris says, half-smiling against a decorative cushion as he falls into this again, how fucking _easily_ he can banter with Zach, it’s fucking intoxicating. “And I quote, no nerdy work shit tonight. Going back on your word already, I can’t believe you.”

“You started it — you brought up Karl.”

“Is that all Karl is to you now? You know, a long time ago, you used to be friends.”

“Oh, Chris,” Zach sighs. Chris listens as Zach grunts a little on his end — probably getting comfortable, too, still on that couch. Which is weird — where’s that kid he’s with to pull Zach into their king-sized coffin at a reasonable hour? Chris would ask, but it’ll probably come up of its own accord soon enough. 

As for Chris also being on a couch in the middle of the night — well, Duncan doesn’t — they don’t know each other well enough just yet for this whole _come to bed, sleep with me_ ritual that couples have. Chris isn’t sure what he’d do if Duncan was in the doorway and told him to come to bed — he’d probably brush him off and say he was on the phone, and that would be the end of their fun, casual thing. 

“Comfy now?” Chris asks. He carefully lifts his head a little to make sure he’s alone and then settles back into the cushion under his head.

“Mmm, totally. Bed is so far away. If I’m not careful, I might just stay here all night.” Zach yawns, a loud, wide yawn, and adds, “Besides, there’s something to be said for crawling into bed at dawn, you know? When it’s just barely light? Even if you haven’t been doing anything but sleeping on the couch like an old man.”

“Yeah, it’s a great time of day, no matter what end you come at it from.” 

Chris remembers Zach’s house in New York. He can almost picture the dark living room, the TV off, and it would be a creepy place to wake up in the middle of the night except for the windows showing the sky beginning to lighten just a little. “I had the same kind of night,” Chris says. “Elaborate dinner of my own making, catching up on TV, and now you.”

It’s a lie, but why bring up this non-entity? Zach doesn’t care. Chris _barely_ cares. One day he’ll have someone that’s an actual piece of the foreground, but this guy isn’t it. When that happens, _then_ they can talk about it, and Chris can say “we did this” and “we did that” and Zach (and everyone) will understand, but not tonight. Not this guy. 

“We are such fucking winners,” Zach laughs. “Isn’t it great how we’re using and abusing our wealth and status?”

“Well, to be fair, my dinner was gold-and-cocaine encrusted puffin filet,” Chris replies.

“That’s the worst thing I have _ever_ heard.”

“Dessert was —“

“Here we go, the real worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Petit corgis — four corgi puppies, less than two weeks old, stuffed with —“ 

“YOU’RE A MONSTER,” Zach cries too loudly, and Chris laughs as he hears Zach muffle his fake tears into a cushion or something.

“Oh God, you fell asleep, didn’t you?” Zach asks right in his ear. Chris opens his eyes slowly and groans, feeling his phone digging into his head since, yeah, he kind of fell asleep with the full weight of his head on it. He glances the time glowing in his direction from the cable box — 2:23 AM.

“I don’t — have we been talking this whole time?” Chris asks sleepily. 

“Yeah, don’t worry, princess, you just fell asleep like, now. I heard that snore of yours. Good dream?”

“I dunno, it was only for a second,” Chris yawns. “It’s five now where you are. Still not tired?”

“Just relaxed,” Zach says. “Like I could probably fall into a coma.”

“Which… isn’t like sleeping at all.”

“Ugh, shut up, you picky jerk.”

Chris hums and agrees with him. He shifts onto his back, away from the cable box clock judging him for being up so late.

“Hey,” Chris says suddenly. “Remember last time we talked this late?” He yawns and rubs his hand along his face and the stubble along his jaw.

“I was just thinking of that,” Zach says. “You called and yelled at me because you wanted to write the script, but you never said why.”

“Didn’t I?”

“I mean, you said why you should — because I only know untalented hacks who would drive us on their fixed-gear tandem bicycles to the poor house, if such a thing exists anymore among multimillionaires in a nearly bankrupted nation, but I digress. And you said… I don’t know, maybe that you wanted to? No, you said you’d do a good job. But you never said why.”

Chris swallows hard and has no answer, really, so he stalls. “Well, those are all good answers. They’re all _true_. You have terrible friends who can’t write.”

“Boy, I hope you can.”

“You know I can.”

“I know you can, but I hope you can. Shut up, that makes sense.”

“Mmm, paradoxes.”

“Come on, tell me,” Zach says. “Or do you not know?”

“No, I…”

Yeah, he doesn’t know.

“Is it wrong that I don’t know?” Chris asks. “That J.J. calls me, tells me you’re in charge of all this, and suddenly I _need_ to write that screenplay? I guess I wanted to see if I could. I knew you wouldn’t let me if you didn’t think I could.”

“Really? But. It’s _you_. You’re one of my best friends. I would have —“

“Nope,” Chris says. This he’s sure of, this he knows. “I think you’re harder on me than anyone else I know.” He knows what he wants to say, he can _feel_ what he wants to say: that he and Zach have gone from friends to boyfriends to acquaintances and back to friends, but closer than before, and they’ve gone so far that bullshit doesn’t exist between them anymore, not on any level. It’s a bullshit-free zone. They have to respect each other’s families, but the rest is open season. Punches don’t need to be pulled; Chris is allowed to point out how Zach is a terrible person and Zach is allowed to make Chris stay the fuck away from his projects because he’s terrible at everything but push ups.

Really, they’re just allowed to be terrible to each other. It’s a right earned after _all this_. 

And Chris can’t lie to someone he’s rimmed; it’s the closest thing he has to a personal code of honor.

“It’s when you stop caring about someone that you… that you’re nicest to them and let them get away with anything. When you greet them with a big, cheap smile and give them a hug, and stand there making small talk and don’t listen to a word they’re saying until the second you can politely get away — that’s when you’re done with them. When you placate and appease because you want to escape from them.”

“I didn’t think you were paying attention,” Zach replies.

“You did it to me a couple of times,” Chris answers. “When a new guy was around and you needed to get back to him _right that second_ , you would ooze fake smiles everywhere and run away a minute later. But this is different.”

“When I call at 4 AM to criticize everything about you and dissect your every crevice —“

“You totally care,” Chris laughs. 

“ _Well_ , that’s enlightening. Still doesn’t answer my question of why. Why the writing, why the script, why anything, Chris.”

“Yeah it does.” Chris licks at his bottom lip and shrugs even though no one is there to interpret these non-verbal gestures of his. He thinks the nonchalance travels over the air, though. “You’re babysitting this monster for J.J., right? So I knew I’d get the double shot of Zach Quinto Honesty Juice. And if you said _no, I’m sorry, you can’t write the script_ , you would mean _Chris, your work genuinely isn’t good enough for this, so stick to what you do_. If I was really lucky that day, you’d tell me why, but the _no_ would be the important part.”

“Can I note for our ongoing list of disgusting words: _juice_ is one of them.  I don’t even order it anymore when I go out for brunch  — _mimosa_ has o.j. In it, but you don’t have to say it, so it’s a win win.”

“Juice is awesome, but you’re right, the word itself sounds slimy. No good alternatives, though. What can you say instead? Nectar?”

“Liquified, strained pulp.” Zach makes a strangled sound with his mouth and adds, “Nope, I was wrong, _pulp_ is another one. It’s all these onomatopoetic words — not true onomatopoeia, but like, words where you’re accustomed to imagining what they mean when you hear the word itself. And what they mean is kind of gross.”

“Yeah, like _pony_ isn’t bad. Pony!”

“Are you seeing a pony as you say it?” Zach asks as he laughs. “I totally am.”

“Dude, it really does _sound_ like a pony! It’s amazing! Words. They’re so cool.”

“I should brush up on any of those other languages I don’t actually know,” Zach says. “Just so we could do this in more than one language.”

“I know Spanish really well — learn that. It’ll be great.”

“Ugh, are you kidding, this right here is my only free time for the rest of forever.”

“And you’re blowing it on me? That’s sweet of you, I have to say.”

“I don’t blow you enough as — wait. That. That doesn’t.”

Chris is already chuckling while Zach sighs.

“Yeah, I get it, it’s funny because we used to, but what I’m saying — what am I saying? _Dammit, Chris_. I think 5 AM is catching up with me.”

“5:30. Almost six, actually.”

“Even better. Anyway — right, you’re totally right. I… I don’t know, Corey and Neal are so good at convincing me why someone is worth our company’s time and money, and I’m usually too busy with other stuff to do anything but just say, fine, give them the three grand they need to make some little movie or write a comic book or whatever. It’s not a big deal. But this is J.J.’s everything, you know? I couldn’t fuck that up. But.”

There’s a lengthy pause that finally makes Chris ask, “But what?”

“I was so glad it was you,” Zach says. “That you’re actually good at something besides push ups and reading Neruda. Can I be totally condescending for a second?” He doesn’t give Chris a chance to answer; no, Zach just adds, “I’m so glad I can be proud of you. Like. You amaze me all the time, make me laugh, and that’s easy, but Karl’s been sneaking me a couple of snippets of scenes here and there — don’t be mad at him! I begged him, I did! I might have threatened his children!”

“They’re from _New Zealand_ , what could you threaten them with? They survive clock spiders and being next to Australia, the scariest place on Earth —with what could you _possibly_ scare Karl Urban’s children?”

“I don’t know, I just sent a screenshot of me doing my evil mastermind grin and I guess there was enough promise in there to scare Karl shitless.”

“Send me that photo, I’ll keep it for future reference. Maybe you’ll become a meme.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Whatever, I don’t know where this Photoshop is on my computer anyway.”

“Small miracles.”

“So you’re proud of me?” Chris asks a little too smugly. 

Yeah. Chris would take it — he’s going to be that guy and take it all, citing lack of praise from all corners because he genuinely can’t remember the last time someone said that to him. (His parents were surprised at all the recent success, and pleased, but he supposed neither of them thought that he needed to hear the words _I’m proud of you_. Which — A+ psychoanalysis from his mother and sister there.)

“Yeah,” Zach says. “You’re Chris Pine and this screenplay is going to be amazing. And then John will cast some amazing people to act out your words, and J.J. will push his camera guys around some more, make another movie, and we’ll be rolling in money again.”

“I have to say: I like this new materialistic Zach. There’s something so… refreshingly terrible about him.”

“Oh?”

“No, I think New York’s been great for you. No more dating stupid models that you collected like a woman and her shoes —“

“That’s sexist.”

“Just admit you hoarded boys.”

“Not _boys_ — they were —“

“No more month-long cleanses where you’d show up outside my door crying while walking Noah because you hadn’t eaten in like, four days —“

“Ingmar Bergman had just died!”

“Oh, that _was_ sad,” Chris admits.

“Basically, you’re saying red meat and selfishness makes me a better person.”

“Definitely one I like knowing.”

“This is a good time to hang up and go to bed,” Zach announces. “Before you ruin it by saying something awful.”

“What, no, I’m too tired to be mean. Feels like I’m drunk.”

“Oh no, you’re a mean drunk — not even mean, just a _jerk_ — no! Look! You have me doing it now! I’m being mean! Okay, back up. Hey. Hey. Good night, Chris. I’m proud of you. I can’t wait to read your script.”

Chris blinks slowly at his phone and shakes his head, kind of sad Zach can’t see how he’s smiling right now, and replies, “Night, Zach. You’re… kind of amazing.”

“Ugh, there it goes. You did it. _Kind of_. Just say it. Say it, Chris. Say I’m amazing. SAY IT, CHRIS. Shit, that was too loud.” He lowers his voice and hisses into his phone, “ _Saaaaaaaaaay it, saaaaaaaaaay it_.”

“You’re amazing, Zach, when you remember to eat and give up on the pretense of ever doing yoga again.”

“I’ll take it! Night, Chris.”

“Night.”

*

It takes some time (okay, like a week?) but Karl finally proves that he’s not just a pretty face, and he's not just a nerdsultant, and he’s not just piping in when Chris can’t remember how to spell some Romulan name. Karl is, has been, and apparently will be that voice outside Chris’s head that snaps _GET FUCKING REAL_ in the most sarcastic tone imaginable.

Like when Chris can no longer put off actually starting the fucking script.

Apparently, that had been Bob and Alex’s problem, too, since Chris has combed through their copious notes more times than he would like to admit and has committed every fucking word and page to his heart, as though a fully-realized script will reveal itself like a Magic Eye poster if he just reads it enough times. Yeah, parts of it have done that — he’s had clear visualizations of how things should look and sound, but — 

 _Starting_. 

He catches Karl staring at him late one morning, propping his chin on his hand and watching Chris over the top their open laptops and the barren, startlingly clean No Man’s Land in between.

Chris meets Karl’s eyes and his hands suddenly fly to his lap, fingers clawing into his thighs unconsciously as they stare each other down.

“What’ll be the first word?” Chris asks too quietly.

“Some stage direction,” Karl replies. “INT or EXT, your choice. Or you could even count the title page as the first word: UNTITLED STAR TREK SEQUEL.”

“Yeah, but.” Chris feels himself smile helplessly, just a tiny crook upwards at the corner of his mouth, and says, “If I don’t write it, then it can’t suck.”

“If you don’t write it,” Karl says after some consideration, “You’ll be wearing your scrotum as a hat. Quinto will then _literally_ bend you over using his insane yoga strength and force your head _up_ your own ass. And you’ll stay there until you suffocate.”

Chris blinks slowly and reels a little at how inspiringly graphic that was.

“But —“

“Oh my _god_ , _really_?” Karl snaps. “Just _write_ , just write the first word, all right? Go. Just say it. Say it. You _know what the first scene is_ , just fucking write it! Come on!”

> **INT.**

“There, I fucking did it, god,” Chris sighs.

Then he looks at the word, looks at his copy of the shooting script that J.J. let him keep from way back when, and his eyebrows furrow.

“Nope, that’s wrong,” Chris says to himself.

> OVER BLACKNESS, we HEAR careful, measured FOOTSTEPS walking down a corridor.  
> 

“Oh, that’s better,” Karl says from over Chris’s shoulder. 

“Gah!” Chris shrieks. “Get off.” He pushes Karl away and Karl reluctantly returns to his half of the table.

“And nice call back to the first script.”

“Thanks.”

Chris is stuck again.

“Fade in?” Karl suggests. “Shoulders, remember?”

“But wouldn’t Gary be wearing the black Spock uniform if he had taken an instructor position at the Academy?” Chris asks. “So we would automatically know that it couldn’t be Jim because he’d be in his golds and this has to be someone from the Academy.”

“Or,” Karl says with a quick manic gleam in his eye. “He’s walking down a corridor that ends in sunlight —“

“MORE LENS FLARE,” Chris yells at his laptop as he writes. “And that leaves us with the silhouette of a guy who is in fucking charge and in control of his shit.”

“You can’t actually describe it like that,” Karl notes.

“Would you stop killing my dreams?” 

“It’s my thing.”

“Is not,” Chris says as he types furiously. “You’re just taking over since Zach isn’t here. And hey, Bob and Alex totally swore _all the fucking time_ in their script.”

“Speaking of which,” Karl says as he holds up Chris’s phone that his giant squid arms picked up across the table. “Quintonius on your phone for you? Or did you leave it on silent so we wouldn’t answer it?”

“Tell him to shut up — _I’m writing_ ,” Chris says a little too proudly.

Chris manages to ignore the conversation Karl has a few feet across from him, something that barely registers along the lines of, “Quinto, shut up, Chris is writing. Yes, writing the script, not in his diary. I have his day very carefully planned and crying into his journal is a post-lunch activity, and it’s only brunch time here. Granola, mostly — he needs to stay regular while the stress —“

Chris picks up his laptop and leaves in a huff, stomping down to his “office” and closing the door firmly behind him while Karl laughs.

It’s so fucking likely that Zach didn’t even _call_ and Karl did that just to fuck with him — dammit, he loves/hates that guy.

*

That first day, Chris writes the opening scene with Gary and the admiral, and he tinkers with the bar scene, which brings him up to about a sixth of the total script done (okay, barely 10 new pages, whatever). He emerges from his writing hollow again and finds Karl on the couch, arm draped over his eyes. Karl seems to hear Chris approach, though, and lifts his arm a little so he can look at Chris.

“So?”

“Before the actual plot, right,” Chris begins, “We need a scene on the _Enterprise_ that’s like… establishing. Like a team scene, everyone totally in love with each other, working together — I just don’t know anything about how a fake starship would work — where the fuck do we _start_?”

Karl instantly mobilizes and walks back to his camp at Chris’s dining room table, popping the laptop open as soon as he sits down. Chris watches him, carefully and almost a little wary, before he sits down across from Karl and continues to save his pages compulsively. 

“So we decided this was taking place at the ship’s six-month review, huh?” Karl says.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Okay, I’ll pull some technobabble out of my ass, but you need to tell me what you want them to be doing,” Karl says. “You provide the banter, I’ll provide the filler.”

Chris nods and then looks back at his suddenly completely inadequate pages because they may fulfill their own purpose but _fuck why isn’t this done yet!!!!!!_

“Last five minutes on board the ship,” Chris says suddenly. “Not literally the last five minutes, but like, the last five minutes for the bridge crew. They’re checking and re-checking before they hand off the ship to whoever.”

“Okay, so write the banter,” Karl repeats, “And I’ll fill in the babble.”

*

> INT. ENTERPRISE - BRIDGE - CONTINUOUS
> 
> The turbolift opens and there's Kirk, just as sure as when we left him on the first day. This time, though, instead of heading straight for the captain's chair, he moves smoothly from station to station, asking questions and reintroducing us to his crew. EVERYONE is moving at a million miles an hour, but we stay with Kirk.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (to Uhura)  
>  So the kids up in that tower just paged me _again_ to ask -- 
> 
> PUSH IN on Uhura working hard at her station. She _makes_ the time to glance over her shoulder and roll her eyes at Kirk. It rolls off his back; it's almost reassuring to him at this point.
> 
> UHURA  
>  Why we're not ready to leave yet? Did you mention how the captain wanted everything backed up and encrypted and then backed up again, but mobilized in case of a _coup_ , which, _what_? 
> 
> KIRK  
>  (to everyone)  
>  End of the year quiz, everyone! What's the one thing we've all learned on our past couple of missions to strange new worlds, encountering new life forms and new civilizations --
> 
> PUSH IN on the front of the bridge and Chekov and Sulu's console, both of them ready for leave and showing it the way Uhura wouldn't.
> 
> CHEKOV  
>  With all due respect, Captain, if you say that again, I will boldly go and demand a transfer, possibly to the private sector. They pay well.
> 
> SULU  
>  (to Chekov)  
>  Can you be paid well when we don't use currency? I mean, not _really_.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (interrupts)  
>  Come on, you're getting off track! 
> 
> He continues moving among the stations, smiling and encouraging everyone busily at work. 
> 
> PUSH IN on conspicuously empty SCIENCE STATION. Kirk passes by with quick glance, addresses everyone on the bridge again.
> 
> KIRK (CONT'D)  
>  What's the most important thing we've learned in our first six months?
> 
> CREW  
>  (collectively)  
>  ALWAYS BE ARMED.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (winces)  
>  If Admiral Pike asks, that is _not_ what his "humanitarian armada" said, okay?
> 
> PUSH IN on Uhura again, just over Kirk's shoulder now, as she says:
> 
> UHURA  
>  "Humanitarian" is an outdated and speciest term anyway. And for the record: yes, we are the only starship to have a 3,000 word addendum to our final report on the updating of Terran and human-specific terminology for use in Federation-wide reports.
> 
> We FOCUS on Kirk again, who grins, loving it, loves it so much he has to say:
> 
> KIRK  
>  This is why I need to have your babies. Remember the time we almost became slugs and had each other's babies? That was _weird_.
> 
> As Kirk walks around, a yeoman, Rand, flanks him on one side and offers him a PADD to sign -- every time Kirk hands it back, she presses something and hands it back to him with the stylus. It goes on a few times until:
> 
> KIRK  
>  Okay, how many more pages do I have to sign?
> 
> RAND  
>  Just initial -- last minute inventory, storage requests, and I think a couple dozen are from Commander Spock, just for fun. _Those_ you have to read.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (as he signs)  
>  Where _is_ Spock? And Bones? And has someone told Scotty that --
> 
> Kirk rushes over to the captain's chair and hits the COMLINK, immediately putting his voice on a ship-wide broadcast.
> 
> KIRK  
>  Attention Engineering: all modifications _must remain on the ship_ for the duration of shore leave. If you're worried about having violated that policy on distilling liquor on board a starship, then you shouldn't have violated it in the first place, huh? And Scotty: you _must_ leave the ship for leave. You _cannot_ stay on board while we're off-duty. Go out and get some sun, or I'll have Security help you find a nice ocean and then throw you in it. 
> 
> Kirk steps away from the chair and then dashes back to flick the COMLINK again, nearly knocking into Rand as he moves.
> 
> KIRK  
>  And that goes for _all_ the apostles of Mr. Scott -- you're all going to go out and _not_ think about warp core theory for ten whole days or I will hurt you.
> 
> RAND  
>  (skeptically)  
>  Think that'll work?
> 
> KIRK  
>  (laughs)  
>  It'll be a miracle if they get off the ship, so let's aim for that, huh?
> 
> The back turbolift opens and McCoy makes his presence known with only a glare.
> 
> MCCOY  
>  Dammit, Jim, stop wasting time pandering to Engineering and approve our shipping and storage requests! Those goons from spacedock are here to take everything to Med but wouldn't you know it, the only _honest_ bureaucrats in Starfleet are the ones who won't move a case of vaccines off the ship without _your approval_.
> 
> Rand takes the PADD from Kirk and works some kind of magic before placing it in his hands again. He signs a few more things and gives McCoy the ok.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (to McCoy)  
>  Everything going okay down there?
> 
> MCCOY  
>  (sarcastically)  
>  Just fine, now that I can get back to our hypoallergenic orgy.
> 
> KIRK  
>  Is _that_ what you're calling now? What happened to the "plague-ridden misfits who dare to call themselves members of the medical profession"?
> 
> MCCOY  
>  Well, now we're almost on leave, so we're getting -- almost fond of each other.
> 
> KIRK  
>  You big softie.
> 
> MCCOY  
>  Watch your mouth or you'll find yourself vaccine-less when we come back from leave, _Captain_.
> 
> McCoy returns to the turbolift, which slides open and reveals Spock. They exchange places with quick glances and nods at each other before McCoy glares the turbolift doors closed. 
> 
> Spock stands in front of the closed turbolift door and looks at Kirk, who shows off his biggest smile yet.
> 
> KIRK  
>  I was wondering if you'd gone on without me!
> 
> SPOCK  
>  (walking down the steps to Kirk)  
>  And let your account be the definitive report on our activities for the past six months? It would be unthinkable.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (mock-hurt)  
>  Hey now, I'd give a faithful report on everything we did, promise.
> 
> SPOCK  
>  Yes, complete with inaccurate colloquialisms and sound effects. I imagine the transcription software would finally have a challenge.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (grins)  
>  That's me -- challenging, bold --
> 
> SPOCK  
>  (interrupts)  
>  The work has trickled up from the rest of the ship to the bridge. The crew is ready to depart once we here have completed our preparations, which --
> 
> KIRK  
>  (motions to everything around them)  
>  Look at our little hive, bustling with activity, and you're asking _me_ if we've "completed our preparations"?
> 
> SPOCK  
>  (looks around)  
>  Yes, that was foolish of me when you have clearly not.
> 
> Rand makes her presence known again by literally inserting herself between them, careful not to touch Spock.
> 
> RAND  
>  (interrupts, to Kirk)  
>  Captain, the forms.
> 
> KIRK  
>  (sighs)  
>  Right, right, let me at them again.   
>  (to Spock)  
>  Rand and this PADD are currently devouring my attention -- could you do that First Officer thing you do so well?
> 
> Spock gives an eyebrow lift that, judging by the grin on Kirk's face, is exactly what he meant. 

*

“What are they going to do on _shore leave_?” Chris asks his empty living room when he thinks he’s finished the Gary Mitchell section about a week later. It’s mid-July already and Chris is trying not to think about the number of days he has left to his semi-official deadline.

(Okay, not _semi-official_ — maybe semi-official to the studio people who have been nodding along to the delays this whole time while turning their focus to making more movies about exploding robot-cars, but it’s definitely an official deadline for Zach, who has promised to commit human rights violations against Chris if the script’s not ready for everyone to pick apart by August.)

The Gary section ends well — Spock’s impassioned speech convinces the board that Kirk is more than competent to stay on as captain (the _Enterprise_ being intact and running better than ever thanks to Scotty’s “modifications” is also some terrific evidence in their favor); Gary agrees to teach at the Academy for a term and then will go back on active duty as someone’s First Officer until a starship comes up in need of a captain; the crew disperses to visit with their families — except Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

It’s a writerly thing to do, isn’t it? Didn’t Hemingway say something about that? How even if there are aspects of a story you’re excluding from a narrative, you better know them all through and through? So even if they’re not showing shore leave, they still need to know what’s happening on shore leave.

“No Spock and Uhura?” Karl asks when he reads over Chris’s first complete draft of that section.

“I don’t know — I mean, I think she can do better than Spock. Wait, that sounded — okay, what I _meant_ is that Uhura needs to be more than someone’s love interest in this movie.”

“It’s complicated, though,” Karl says. “You would think people in their situation would break up being in a tin can in space and not able to stand the sight of each other after a while. But even then, would you give up regular sex?” 

They’re having their discussion over video chat, as Karl actually needed to pay attention to his wife and family for a few days and Chris needed to clean up the disaster area his living/dining room had become with Karl there for the past two weeks. Chris watches Karl tip his chair onto its back legs. Karl adds, “And the part of Spock’s deposition we see in your script is fairly, how shall I put it, _gay_ , which brings up the underlying question of who comes first — Spock’s career and supporting Kirk or his romantic relationship?”

“I think for Uhura, the career would come first. _Her_ career. Spock… would do what was logical? Which… is also his career?”

“Well that’s condescending,” Karl replies. “ _Honey, it’s for your own good, I promise, how could you handle_ —“

“God, right, never mind, that _is_ horrible.”

Chris props his chin up on his hand and watches Karl think, looking at his screen thoughtfully. His own brain is mostly fried from the non-stop writing and he can’t quite handle these kinds of questions and their endless implications and effects — he’s really not smart enough for this. Canceling the Spock and Uhura love fest would kind of seem like invalidating the events of the last movie —

“I think,” Chris says suddenly, “That the problem is sex. That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it — who would break up a perfectly healthy romantic and sexual relationship to provide platonic moral support to their boss?”

“Exactly — there’s no good reason to break them up or give them any kind of _drama_ , so they’ll be a perfectly normal couple. Zach and Zoe are pros — when we’re actually in the process of filming, they’ll find ways of making the relationship real in the background.” Karl thinks for a moment and adds, “And this is such a fictional concern! That’s what it is — we’ve lost sight of how actual people function. For the most part, this isn’t a concern people have. Everyone we know manages to balance work and a domestic life without one destroying the other — maybe in another movie it’ll come to a head, but not in this one.” 

“So I should rewrite the end,” Chris muses. “Spock and Uhura go off on their own little couples’ thing, and Kirk and McCoy… hey, spend it with Gary, why not.”

“Oh, Chris.” Karl sighs heavily, _really_ heavily, and says, “Yeah, you should end it like that, and then get out of the house and go get laid, all right? Please? Would you do it for me? Oh, and hey!” Chris braces himself for the impending wave of sarcasm, which arrives after Karl’s short, bitter laugh. “You could even take it as an opportunity to _shave that fucking cat off your face_. Honestly, didn’t you _just_ shave like two weeks ago? How did it grow back already?”

“People like beards,” Chris replies.

“You look filthy. You look like you’re in the market for a cabin and some explosives. You look like an unwashed desert hermit who has committed himself to shitting in a hole of his own digging. You look like cat vomit. You look like a hoarder who has collected used Brillo pads from fast food restaurant dumpsters and shapes them into portraits of famous Renaissance figures, and really wonders why museums refuse to exhibit his work. Actually, you look like one of said hoarder’s portraits.”

Chris stonewalls him and then asks, “You done?”

“Actually, I’m not! I could go on for days, but then you would be sitting there, your beard growing even more obscene, and I can’t encourage that kind of behavior. Do you call your mother with that beard?”

“Had to bring my mom into it, didn’t you?” Chris sighs. “I’ll send you the revised draft later today.”

“I’ll mark it as spam unless attached to it is a capture of your clean-shaven face, Chris. I mean it. You look like a failed B-movie monster. If you groomed your beard, you could look like there was a soft, cute angora sweater on your face — as it is, you’re the badly knitted sweater made from cheap, discounted yarn that my mother-in-law makes for my children every Christmas.”

“That’s just mean.”

“YOUR BEARD IS OFFENSIVE TO THE EARTH. IT IS CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING. THE ICE CAPS MELT IN HOPES OF DROWNING YOUR FACE. WALRUSES —”

Chris closes the chat window and catches sight of his face in a mirror on his wall. He has to frown a little because he thinks Karl’s tongue-lashing actually caused his beard to recede a little back into his face and lose some of its luster.

“Dammit,” Chris sighs.

*

_HEY —_

_No space ladies for the captain this time around — this time, he’s busy falling in love with his crew and captaining and shit. That cool?_

__

 

_uhhhhh okay._

_can we kiss this time? come on i should be allowed to kiss someone new in every movie. will settle for karl. his mouth to my mouth. that’s how it goes, right?_

_Sent from my iPhone_

__

 

_Karl says no because Spock is a Vulcan and you’re just a pervert._

__

 

_look just because that’s true doesn’t mean i’m not right._

_Sent from my iPhone_

*

By the time Zach allows himself to call again, Chris and Karl are… kind of done with the script.

“What do you mean, _kind of done_?”  Zach asks, his voice rising a little. Chris can’t tell if it’s relief because he said “done” or if Zach burst a blood vessel in his eye because Chris said “kind of.”

“I mean we’re kind of done,” Chris replies, shrugging even though Zach can’t see. He hopes that conveys the _done_ ness of it. “We have rough drafts of the last two sections — Karl is smoothing over the one with the Romulans and I’m working on the Roman prison one —“

“Wait, Roman prison? Wait, what?”

“Watch “Bread and Circuses”, you’ll understand.”

“But there’s a _Roman_ prison? Like, isn’t that overkill along with the Romulans? Because from what I remember of those ten minutes of whatever _Star Trek_ TV show I’ve watched, they have Roman titles for their government and stuff, so.”

Chris asks Karl, who shakes his head and doesn’t look away from his laptop. “We don’t mention anything like that in the script for the second part,” Karl replies. “So the Romulans are just Romulans.”

“Right right,” Chris says. “Karl says it’s not a problem — the “Balance of Terror” segment is really about making the Romulan crew seem like a parallel version of the _Enterprise_ crew, especially the captain and first officer, so that government stuff will barely come up. No confusion, I promise.”

“And what’s this about a prison planet?” Zach asks.

“Oh — you, me, and Karl are stuck on this planet that’s basically like ancient Rome except they have their battles in the Colosseum televised, and Spock and McCoy get to become buddies while Kirk is off fucking a slave girl —“

“ _What the fuck_?” Zach asks.

“And then Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov save the day!” Chris finishes.

“I’m skeptical, but. Fine. Even if it sounds like we’re ripping off _The Hunger Games_ by using a plot that’s forty years older than _The Hunger Games_.”

“Why don’t you believe in us?” 

“Is that actually a question?” Zach sighs loudly and adds, “By the way, O Writerly One, am I finally allowed to ask that thing I was forbidden from asking? About when…”

“Oh. Yeah. Like, ten days. Ten days latest.”

“Which means…”

“Ten days.”

“No come on I want it now,” Zach whines.

“Ten days! Now leave us alone, we have work to do. You’ll have it in ten days.”

“You’re not even going to appease me by telling me that I could get it sooner if I leave you alone?”

“Ten. Days.”

“UGH, FINE. Just remember John can’t start his job until _you finish yours_.”

“Gee Zach, no fucking shit.”

“Ooh, you _are_ mad, you said _gee_. I bet I can make you say _golly_.”

“Fuck off, Zach.”

“Bye, Chris!” Zach sings.

“I heard that,” Karl says when Chris hangs up. “He’s lost his mind.”

“The little he had left to lose,” Chris sighs. “Okay. Let’s kill this script. I’m ready to go back to doing absolutely nothing.”

“Amen to that,” Karl says. “Let’s go.”


	4. Casting -- Silver Lake -- August 2011

  
(art by [maggie2mw](http://maggie2mw.livejournal.com/21229.html))

 

Karl shows up at John’s house one afternoon in mid-August with a suspiciously big backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Shit, you should not look that cool for whatever havoc you’re planning,” John says at his front door as he looks Karl up and down. “What havoc are you planning?”

“The princess has kicked me out of our writing room,” Karl replies. “The big draft is done and he says he needs to be alone to smooth it over before he sends it to everyone.”

“Everyone?”

“Apparently it’s going to make the rounds,” Karl says as he shifts into his mountain man stance and looks off into the distance where these plans are being revealed to him on the wind. “First to Bob and Alex so they can tinker with it as they will, because it’s their story after all.”

“Poor princess,” John says.

“Then it goes to the producers — Damon, Bryan, and, of course, Quinto.”

John chokes back a laugh, turns it into a cough, and then nods very seriously so Karl can continue.

“Then J.J. gets it, and then Paramount gets it, and only then can we move on from this fucking purgatory to actual acting.”

“So what’s he worried about?” John asks. “He’s good. Zach says he’s good. It’s going to be a good script.”

“He’s a perfectionist,” Karl sighs. “And now that the draft is done, this whole month essentially will be everyone and their mother picking apart Chris’s baby and having him rewrite it until it’s something that can be committed to film.”

“So you think he should be drunk for this?” John asks as he motions to Karl’s backpack with his chin. “Because while I support this, it’s also generally acknowledged that I’m not a good judge of anything that needs to be taken even a little seriously.”

“You know you can’t talk like that anymore, right?” Karl asks. “Because you’re _a casting director_ for this thing now.”

“It’s me, Karl,” John says. “John Cho. Remember? Come on. Let’s go save the princess before he voids the warranty on his laptop with his river of tears.”

*

“God _dammit_ , Chris!” Karl yells when Chris opens the door of his apartment. “I told you to shave.”

“You didn’t say my face,” Chris clarifies. “Are you coming in?”

“I don’t think we should,” Karl says. He blocks Chris’s doorway with his arm so John can’t get through. “People who come in here… they don’t leave the way the same way. They’re… _changed_.”

“But don’t you want to find out what Chris shaved instead of that lush Rochesterian face scruff?” John asks. “I’m thinking it’s his balls.”

“And one ankle,” Chris admits. He pulls up his pant leg and shows them a bare patch of skin that goes from his ankle to a third of the way up his shin. “Changed my mind, remembered I have to like, go to the gym and wear shorts in public and I’m already —“

“Yes, Chris, please, tell me more about your body hair. You have no idea how much I care.” John thinks about rolling his eyes for emphasis, but instead flicks his tongue out and presses against Karl’s barrier-arm getting as close to Chris as he can before Chris flinches, bucks, and runs away like a terrified pony.

Except Chris seems too… nervous for that, so he stays where he is and just looks to Karl for some kind of support.

“No, don’t give me those eyes,” Karl snaps. “I’ve brought John because you’re going to send that script out _today_ and then you’re going to act like a human.”

“Whatever that means,” Chris replies, and he _rolls his eyes_ , which John won’t fucking stand for. It’s one thing for him to think about doing it, but it’s another thing for Chris to _do it_.

“Did you just feel that?” John asks Karl in his most haunted voice. “Like someone walking over my grave… like I’ve just seen the teenage angst that my son’s going to be sweating at me from his greasy pores when he’s 15. I mean _all_ the angst, all of it, in one 30-year-old man’s eyeroll.”

Chris starts to roll his eyes again but John screams and stops him.

“Oh, be prepared,” Karl replies. “I don’t know if it’s the existential angst caused by Dad being away for huge stretches of time, or the flipping between home and Los Angeles every other year, but my son is _ten_ and starting to pout angrily at me already.”

“Age is just a number,” John says as he looks at Chris. “And Chris’s number is somewhere between twelve and nineteen.”

“Okay, the more you stand in my doorway and mock me, the less script I’m revising and sending to Bob and Alex, so.”

“True,” John considers. “So does that mean we can enter your lair?”

“I asked you!” Chris shrieks. “Like ten minutes ago! Do you want to come in?! And you just —“ He makes a strangled noise and stomps away from the door to his dining room table and the computer that holds all of their fates.

Karl finally lowers his arm so they can enter and flank Chris on either side of his chair at the table.

“So you’re backing all this shit up on an external drive, right?” John asks. “Because Macs — all hard drives, really — have this tendency where they just _die_ , irrevocably, so —“

“What are you doing to me?” Chris asks. “Just —“

“Here, I brought you a hard drive,” Karl says as he digs into the backpack of mystery that apparently also contains a Best Buy. “But first just save and email me the file and —“

“GUYS,” Chris yells. “Okay. Just let me finish getting through this, email it to Bob and Alex, and then I’ll do anything you want. I’ll shave, I’ll back up, babysit, whatever, just — let me finish.”

“What’s there left to finish?” Karl asks. “You’ve been ‘just tinkering’ for days.”

“I’m… whittling,” Chris says. He looks back to his screen and his cursor continues the slow descent through line after line of dialogue. “Getting rid of extraneous words and…”

“Really? Really?” John asks. “No. Let Bob and Alex do that. You know their writing style — if they think of something better, they’ll replace the whole thing, not say, _well this works better except let’s take out this adverb_ or whatever. They’re cut and burn, not… whatever this is.”

“Pruning. English major bullshit,” Karl adds.

“Exactly. So come on. It’s as good as it’s going to get.”

“Don’t _tell me_ that,” Chris snaps. “That means it’s complete fucking _shit_ , and I — this can’t be _shit_.”

“It’s a first draft!”

“It’s not shit; I helped,” Karl says.

“And what do you know —“

“Oh, don’t,” John says as he puts a hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Don’t even play that card, Mr. _I was in the Princess Diaries 2_. Do _not_ be that asshole.”

Chris tenses under John’s hand and John dramatically (behind Chris’s back so he can’t see) steps away, putting his hands up in surrender. “Hey Karl,” John says slowly as he steps away from the fidgety, ticking bomb Chris has become. “Let’s sit in the kitchen and drink while Chris finishes his edits, huh?”

“Aw, but this was so much more productive,” Chris replies with all the sarcasm his little beard could muster.

“But I love mean Chris,” Karl protests. “He’s like the tiniest pug with the loudest bark, which is still a pug’s bark and _hilarious_.”

“Be that as it may, let’s chill all that beer in your backpack and eat whatever’s in his fridge, like good friends,” John says as he puts both hands on Karl’s shoulders and steers him towards the kitchen.

“You’re like fucking _locusts_ ,” Chris calls after them. “If locusts could talk, I’d bet they’d be assholes like you.”

John opens Chris’s fridge and lets out a couple of scratchy pug barks before he _ooh_ s at a block of fancy cheese and a fruit spread that hasn’t expired yet.

*

It takes Chris another ninety minutes, but then he’s finally sent off the script to Bob and Alex and declares he’s ready to join humanity. Or, at least, he’s ready to stand at his kitchen island with Karl and John and eat the best things they found in his fridge and drink the beer they brought.

“Is it up to scratch, princess?” John asks.

“I hate it,” Chris says. As Chris thinks about it, John tries so, so hard to ignore the one tiny _completely insignificant_ crumb of cheese hanging out on Chris’s overbearded chin that is driving him out of his fucking mind. “It’s not sharp enough,” Chris finally says.

“Oh, for real?” John asks as he’s distracted from Cheese Watch. He finally leans forward and gently smacks the crumb off, leaving Chris looking totally offended. John can see that every molecule of his California-bred soul wants to scoff and say, “DUDE,” but he holds it in — not subtly enough that John doesn’t notice all this conflict in his face and beard, but enough that he purses his mouth for a second and then keeps talking. 

“Like, if you saw this movie in a theater tomorrow, I can’t think of any lines you’d be quoting with your friends out of the theater.”

John really has nothing he can comfort Chris with, so he tries to phrase the blunt, terrible truth in the nicest way he can.

“Well,” he says. His eyes dart to Karl quickly, but Karl is wandering happily at the bottom of his beer bottle, which is roughly a trillion miles away from the conversation John and Chris are having. “That’s why they’ve _made it_ as writers and —“

Yeah, he’ll leave out the mean part ( _and your claim to fame is either No Not Shatner or No That’s Chris EVANS_ ), because there’s that defeated look about Chris that suggests they might have to witness a grown man cry in his kitchen and _god_ , that would be a terrible way to continue their already meh day.

“Why they’re so famous,” Karl finishes, much to John’s surprise. “And if you sent them a perfect script, well, they’d know _something_ was up. You need to leave little gaps of terrible whey can assert their writerly prowess.”

“That’s right, Chris,” John adds. “You’re just _too good_ , and blah blah blah look, I hate to mention my actual function in the whole production process, but am I ever going to _read_ this script? Can I start throwing actors’ names around for these characters that you’ve half-described over too many beers for the past couple of weeks? Can I know _what I’m doing_ or what?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

It’s John’s turn to roll his eyes and grab another beer. Try as he might to make some kind of impact and insert himself as an unforgettable, biting sore in his friends’ lives, sometimes they just _forget_ why he’s there — like right now when he’s _the fucking casting director_ of their next goddamn movie but it’s slipped Chris’s mind that maybe he should see the script. Is he just too good at being an asshole and leaves no room for — _NO._ They should be able to remember that _he is in charge of casting_ and send him a draft of a script, _maybe_ , at some point along the line!

If John pops the cap off the beer bottle a little testily and puts it down on the kitchen island with a little more force than usual, Chris and Karl don’t notice, probably due to the fact that they both chew like horses.

“ _Well_?” John asks.

“Right, come on,” Chris sighs. “Read my terrible script.”

*

A few days later, Zach sends John an “early draft” of the script and suggests he meet up with the senior casting director, Ally, so they can “devise a casting strategy.” John has to spare a sigh for the person who thought giving Zach real power wouldn’t make him an even bigger douchebag.

(Zach’s email inspires this thought and John realizes while reading it that someone must have told Zach it was good business practice to insert a short paragraph of small talk into business emails when asking/commanding someone to do shit for them. The “I hope you and Kerri are doing well” line at the end, while totally nice and all, had John headdesking and sobbing, mourning the jerk he had come to love who had been kidnapped and contracted Stockholm Syndrome, if that cute, polite note was anything to go by.)

It isn’t that John doesn’t like his Trek co-stars or count them as some of his closest friends in the world; it’s that he’ll be the first to call ‘em as he sees ‘em, and there’s no denying that they’re crybabies and douchebags.

Well, at least, the half of the cast that’s under age 35. He doesn’t remember if that includes Zoe and he needs a new category if she’s not, or he’ll fall back on the classic _women are more mature than men_ , which might be true, or just might be Zoe’s default behavior when trapped in a sausage fest of a franchise.

Now he can do his job and Kerri laughs at him after he announces that he’s not moving from the couch until he’s thoroughly annotated this script — yeah, okay, it’s her laughter that wakes him up from the impromptu nap of his convictions, but whatever, he’s been up late with their son for the past couple of nights because of nightmares and it’s _in no way_ a reflection on Chris’s script.

He doesn’t tell Chris that middle part until Chris is half a minute into swearing off Hollywood and going back to school to make something of himself, which is _adorable_.

(Seriously, one of these days he will stop fucking with Chris, but it’s just so _easy_.)

*

John has Concerns about the script, but he’s not sure whether they’re founded _and_ he’s not sure who he would even talk to this shit about. Their illustrious producers are off doing the nerd summer circuit, Zach is a basketcase and not a _real_ producer — if John brings any of these questions to him, Zach will give himself an ulcer. (See also: Chris.) Karl has officially faded back into the mist of reading scripts for follow-up Trek projects and taking care of his family, his brief curiosity for the process of movie-making seemingly sated and, anyway, John’s question is too… abstract for any of them.

It’s Simon who emails him one day, just to catch up, and Simon who, _of course_ , John hadn’t thought of as being the one who’s In the Know about movies and their success/failure.

 _Have the Trek sequel script! Early draft Chris finished like, two weeks ago. I’m worried that it’s episodic, though, and that each episode seems like a totally different genre — the first one is like, a talky, emotionally charged dramedy, the second is a tense political thriller, and the last is your basic glorified action sequence. Tell me this movie’s going to be okay and I just need to shut my mouth and find people to play these new parts._

Simon calls him in the time it takes him to do some basic time zone subtraction and says, “Hello! Hmm.”

“Yeah. Exactly. Hmm.”

“Well. Are they _good_ episodes?”

“Can’t ask me that, man. It’s Chris.”

“Stop being so hard on him; he tries! I think. Did he try? Karl said he’d been living in the crawlspace Chris calls ‘home’ for the better part of a month helping him — again, I think that’s trying? Sounds like it, but I can’t be sure. You have the script! Tell me about it!”

“Okay, I’ve got some notes on it, but Alex and Bob aren’t done with their changes yet — they’re combing through it to give it that Orci/Kurtzman touch —“

“Known as humor, yes, I see.”

John snorts and continues. “Anyway, it’s such a weird thing to think about — you know, like, will people be dissatisfied that they got three short movies when they came for one _Star Trek_ movie?”

“Are the characters not working? Do they not sound like they’re supposed to? Are the plots not moving along as they should?”

“No no, it’s not a quality thing at all; it’s my paranoia about viewer expectations, I guess. Like, will people see this and snap that we should have made it into a miniseries and not wasted their time with this overblown TV show?”

“ _Is it_ an overblown TV show?”

“No! But —“

“Look, these are only things critics say when a movie _wasn’t good_. It wasn’t good, therefore it should have done other things and been something else. So I’m going to ask again — is the script good?”

John considers it for a few seconds, which has Simon say, “And this pause suggests it isn’t.”

“It’s… adequate. It’s a script. It’s missing punch. Remember when you read even that _early_ fucking draft of the first one? And like, you could feel Bob and Alex losing their _shit_ trying to get this story out of their heads and how infectious that kind of enthusiasm was?”

“They have almost a decade on Chris, though — a decade of writers’ rooms and professional writing, and Chris started _acting_ ten years ago, if that. When’s the last time he wrote something and had it published? When’s the last time he wrote _a feature-length film_? The answer’s never, so no, it’s not going to be as good as Bob and Alex’s, but compared to the piles and piles of shit you’ve read in your career — how is it?”

At that, John had to admit that it was… pretty good.

“You know, sometimes I wonder if you’re not secretly British, or maybe spent a rogue year of your childhood in a British school,” Simon comments. “This very un-American thing of having a doe-eyed innocent like Chris work to get even a _pretty good_ out of you on his first feature-length summer blockbuster screenplay, and he’s not even here to enjoy it!”

“Ugh, shut up, don’t tell him I said something nice.”

“Oh, I certainly will, John Cho, and don’t think I’ll ever let you forget the time you encouraged anyone in anything positive.”

“Hey, upside: the four of us neglected superstars are the heroes of the last third of the movie while Karl, Chris, and Zach are down in some Coliseum being completely gay and Karl and Zach are fighting to the death. We get to save the day! Minorities unite!”

“See, now that sounds _good_ , even if I wasn’t aware I was a minority.”

“Well, you’re old.”

“That’s not — it’s not a minority _on the planet_ — oh, fine, thanks. I’m serious, though, that sounds like a genuinely good segment in the movie! Certainly nothing I’ve seen this summer — okay, there was some of that in the new _X-Men_ , but then they killed the black guy first so what was —“

“You’re rambling.”

“Right, sorry. What made you think it wasn’t good? Will I be murdered by Zach if you just happen to fall on your send button and a copy of the script falls into my virtual lap?”

“Well, we’ll find out! Because — oops! I can’t unsend this email! Oh no, Simon! I —“

“He’s not tapping our phones, is he? Should we start using pre-paid disposable phones for these subversive conversations?”

“He can’t even change the default photo uploader on his iPhone’s Twitter app and I had to show him how to turn autocapitalization off so his followers wouldn’t think he was too enthusiastic about anything in his use of capital letters. There’s a better chance of Zach developing telepathic powers than learning how to hack our phones.”

“I’ll remember this conversation when his ninjas sneak into your house and take you away in the night, and I’ll think of you fondly.”

*

Chris calls him a few days later and sighs heavily before he says anything. So: business as usual.

“Bob and Alex said you should look over my revisions before I send them to J.J.,” Chris says. “As if J.J. hasn’t been secretly reading them the entire time, but I digress.”

“Why me?” John asks as his son sits in his lap and mimics everything he says. “Why _meeeeeeeeeeeee_?” he adds so he can encourage his son to make a similarly irritating and high-pitched noise that’ll drive Kerri nuts.

“Because they said that my scenes are too dry and they can only do so much — someone needs to go through this with me and make it a movie worth watching.”

“Uh, _harsh_ , guys,” John says.

“I mean, it’s a good point.”

“Poor princess. Come over, bring the computer and the backup and some beer. We’ll punch this story in the balls and either make it a trainwreck people can’t look away from or that crazy trainwreck from _Super 8_ that had me screaming like a small child.”

“…uh, okay, I’ll be over.”

No, downtrodden Chris wasn’t his favorite Chris — resilient Chris who teamed up with Zach so they were a pair of complete fucking jerks to everyone else, _that_ was his favorite Chris, but really, he’d take Chris most days over no Chris at all.

Bob and Alex had told Chris to start with the second segment, the reboot of “Balance of Terror” in which the _Enterprise_ runs into a Romulan ship and trap each other in a tense Mexican standoff in space. 

“Yeah, this section was a little dry,” John says as he scans over his copy of the script. “Here’s the thing. What’s the point of this section anyway? Why this episode? Why these characters?”

“You know why,” Chris says. “Incisive commentary on the totally unknowable nature of our political enemies, the shocking bigotry that becomes acceptable during a war, the —“

“Oh my God, are you kidding me?” John asks. “Would _you_ go see that — wrong question, of course you would. No. Condense that for a moron like me who doesn’t care about your indie film festival bullshit, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.”

Chris looks offended for a second and then waves his hands around. “I don’t know. It’s also showing a parallel, alternate _Enterprise_ , I guess — Karl said this episode was special because it went into the Romulan ship without anyone from _Enterprise_ crew.”

“It showed them as they were, and not as enemies of the _Enterprise_ ,” John says.

“Yeah.” Chris slouched in his chair and motioned to his laptop. “How do I make that punchy and exciting?”

“What? Are you kidding me? You’re basically writing a Romulan you-and-Zach.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When Karl explained it to me and then, when I read it,” John begins, “I totally got what you were doing but didn’t understand _why_ you weren’t doing it. Like, you have all the political thriller tension, fine, but you have to make it a little ridiculous. A little adorable. I think the amazing part Bob and Alex want you to tap into is that you’re making these Romulans empathetic and showing that they’re _just_ like us, especially like you and Zach — oh, and important! As Karl reminded me — it’s like a Spock who can smile. That’s key!”

“But they’re trapped in this awful situation where all of them might fire on each other at any time — how do you make that —“

“ _What_?” John replies. “ _You_ are asking _me_ how to write a scene in which _inappropriate bitchiness_ is required?! This is your life, Chris! Just write it!”

Chris slouches even more and stares at his screen, trying to make sense of it all, so John gives him five seconds to do that before he decides the proper course of action is talking Chris to death.

“Okay, so here you cut to the ship, and blahhhhhh all this technobabble and drama, but — what if they’re sarcastic instead? What if the captain and the first officer were just a couple of Romulans out on this routine mission and this bimbo with highlights shows up and is like, _I’m taking you hostage because you’re Romulans and that’s that_?”

“That’s not how it _goes_ ,” Chris protests. “Both sides have casualties — serious ones. The Romulan captain loses his first officer —“

“Wait, change that,” John says as he leans over Chris and highlights something on the screen. “If you’re drawing parallels between Kirk and Spock and… right, Selonus and Talus, you can’t _kill_ Talus and not make that a huge deal on the Romulan ship. This guy that they fire because he fucked up — kill him instead, but don’t mess with the basic dynamics. If you kill the Romulan Spock, then that’ll bring up too many emotional things you don’t have time to handle.” 

Chris opens his mouth to protest, but John nudges him and says, “If Spock died? Shit would shut _down_. Kirk would blast that other ship into a million pieces and then go find each of those pieces and set them on fire, and then he’d get Scotty to invent some giant vacuum cleaner to suck up _all_ those other pieces up, make that space dust into a giant block, and then throw it into space to blast it all over again.”

Chris stares at John and then looks back to his laptop, like the screen will provide him with more answers or explain how a fire can burn in the vacuum of space.

“Take your own advice,” John says. “Oh, or hey, you liked _Hawaii Five-0_. Imagine the Romulan captain and his first as those two guys.”

Chris chokes and asks, “You’re not actually going for them, are you? Like, casting wise? Because — that’s not —“

“No, no way, totally not,” John lies because, yeah, Alex O’Loughlin’s H50 November hiatus matches up with their shooting schedule and that’s not perfectly convenient _at all_ or anything. John hasn’t noticed that Alex has that thing Chris has where he can play the arrogant fuck but has a soft-spot that’s totally Scott Caan in shape and size, and if that’s not Jim Kirk-esque/awesome space captain material, what is? 

“But you know what I mean,” John adds. “You wrote this banter in the first section, when Jim is going around the bridge getting shit organized — why can’t there be more of that on the Romulan ship? The captain and his first — they can be buddies, right? They can joke around and be like, _same shit, different day, I hope there’s pudding in the mess hall after we blow these Federation jerks to pieces_?”

John realizes that the Romulan captain should be a woman and the world shifts on its axis.

“How’s that sound?” John asks, his voice cracking a little.

Chris thinks about it and then looks to John. He tilts his head a little like a dog and John knows he’s in trouble. “Are you okay?” Chris asks. “You’re… sweating. A lot.”

“Why wouldn’t I be totally amazing about everything on the planet right now, Chris?” John asks nervously. “Hold on, I have to write down some casting notes BE RIGHT BACK.”

He finds a notepad they usually use for groceries and manages to scrawl _GET GINA TORRES FROM FIREFLY!!!!!!!!!_ before he pees himself a little and has to go talk to himself in the bathroom for a while.

*

It takes calling Zach on a video chat and John recording most of the conversation on his cell phone, then _playing it back for Chris_ , for Chris to understand that part of his own brain that apparently goes on standby when Zach is around. 

John, meanwhile, wonders who could be a Romulan Spock, but also completely different. Romulans are depicted as Vulcans but not — a species that doesn’t control their emotions and like to gear up for a fight whenever possible. What John would be looking for — what Chris should be rewriting — is a character who stands out among the Romulans the way Spock stands out among the humans on the _Enterprise_. 

Some lithe and glossy-haired bastard with a sense of humor as dry as the Sahara on a summer day in the middle of a drought — could he actually send that to some agents and get hits back?

He takes his preliminary casting notes to Ally, who tells him they’re simultaneously too specific and too vague, and then reminds him of something he hadn’t really thought of:

“ _Don’t_ get attached to the screenwriter,” she warns.

“What? It’s Chris, Ally, you know it’s a little late for that,” John replies.

“I know it’s Chris, your buddy and co-star and everything adorable, he’s a kitten in plaid, it’s wonderful,” she says with a wave of her hand and a half-shrug. “ _But_ , he’s a writer now, and as such, his asshole has tightened to the point where you couldn’t fit a new idea in there with all the industrial lube in the world.”

“Newsflash: that’s Chris.”

“Okay, better metaphor,” she says. “Right. This is Chris’s baby. And you want to take his baby away from him, put it on a diet, find it some much more fashionable baby clothes —“

“You say these things like _everyone_ isn’t going to do that when Chris Pine perfects parthenogenesis.”

“You want to shove a bunch of people he might not like or respect into his baby’s skin.” She raises her eyebrows and asks, “Seriously? The kid metaphor isn’t working? You _have_ a kid. I’m being as gruesome as I can!”

John smiles at her sympathetically and takes her hand, patting it gently. “Come at me, Ally. My kid has simultaneously projectile vomited into my face and shit on my bare feet — no clean path down, by the way, just — shit _everywhere_. But.” John thinks for a second and nods. “I get what you’re saying.”

“Take his suggestions but this is _our thing_ , okay? J.J. okayed you for the same reasons I did — you’re smart and you know what’ll work. You’ve been in enough terrible projects that you pretty much _know everyone_ and —“

“Adam Scott,” John chokes. “I want him to audition for everything.”

“It’s going to be a problem getting all these TV people, what with their schedules and everything,” she says. 

“Just a few auditions and if he’s perfect like I think he’ll be, then we’ll make it work. J.J.'s insane, you know he would.”

*

“I was actually in a Trek movie already,” Adam says as he stands in front of the plain backdrop and looks past the camera at John and Ally. “Not _already_ like everyone needs to be in one, but — _First Contact_? I was nameless crewmember number three and according to YouTube, I had like, one line.”

“Isn’t amazing what fifteen years and an alternate universe can do for you?” Ally laughs. “You’re movin’ up in the world…” She looks down at his credits open on the IMDB iPhone app and adds, “Defiant Helm Crewman.”

“Which sounds pretty bad ass,” John notes.

“ _Defiant_ was the ship,” Ally points out.

“Still bad ass,” John laughs.

Adam rolls up his pages like a statuette and looks directly off into the distance, his expression so seemingly thoughtful that John wants to sigh and kick his heels up like a middle school girl on the phone with her best friend, talking about some quiet, dreamy guy in their class like Adam. “I’d like to thank my agent for finding a classier way of defining that role, and Jesus — anyway.” He breaks and smiles before he shrugs a little. “So. Yeah. Here I am.“

John laughs and holds up his own set of pages. “So we’d like you to read for two parts today — Gary Mitchell and the Romulan First Officer. Still sound good? We’ll go through Gary’s dialogue first.”

Ally had said that she would read Chris’s parts in the Kirk/Gary scene, which John had _no_ problem with letting her do. John had realized that she had spent the past 10 years perfecting a monotone wall in her voice and performance at auditions that really forces actors to work so they convey their meaning. John remembers it from his own audition — he couldn’t ride any kind of wave of camaraderie to conveying intimacy with the casting people, not with Ally stonewalling him. He also thinks that’s what had Chris bomb his first audition — John’s noticed how Chris tends to shift his mood and demeanor to a situation, which sometimes makes for a terrible audition.

Then, sometimes, there’s Adam Scott and how he belongs to the whole Judd Apatow/UCB crew of comedians who clearly bank on that camaraderie to sell the experience of a viewer being their partner-in-crime. That isn’t what J.J. goes for — the crew of the _Enterprise_ aren’t anyone’s “bros” except each other’s, and the hyperstylized, fast-paced style J.J. aims for is so _not_ what those movies are about. 

As it is, Adam picks up on Ally and John not giving him any cues as to how he should play Gary, and John is pleasantly surprised that the act of belonging to a movement of actors who are _sooooo_ post-acting is just that — an act. They do a couple of takes, but John knows instantly that Adam is totally wrong for the Gary role. He writes on his pad:

 _ADAM-AS-GARY_

 _\- Too slight compared to Chris; can’t possibly be a mirror-version of Kirk_

 _\- Because he’s slight, very dark-haired, pointy and angled all over — typical villain build. Not sympathetic compared to Chris._

 _\- Something about his acting? Blahhhhhhhh sorry can I take him to prom?!_

As John looks over his notes and watches Adam go through the same scene, near the end when Kirk grabs Gary’s shoulder and Ally says something like-but-not-exactly “I love you, man,” Adam looks near them and gives this amazing look at some point past both of them; his face lights up and instantly softens him. Even his posture softens a little, too. It’s subtle, but insistent, and that’s why John wanted him to read. He has that heart Chris wrote into Gary, but not the rest. Now that John knows what he’s looking for, it’s going to get easier.

“Okay, thanks. Now the Romulan officer,” John says.

“Well, take a few minutes, grab a water, then we’ll run through it, okay?” Ally says.

“What do you _mean_ actors aren’t machines?” John laughs. “Yeah, sorry, Adam, go for it, I’m just _so excited_ to imagine you with your eyebrows partially shaved off.”

“Shit, what,” Adam realizes. “How did I forget that? Dude, maybe we can write it into _Parks and Rec_. My character’s kind of a nerd.”

“Just be thankful the shoulderpadded Romulan years are over, huh?”

“Uh, yeah, I kind of fall down on my knees every morning and thank fashion that shoulderpads are out and I will _never_ have to wear another padded blazer to a class picture or bar mitzvah.”

“Oh God, you’re one of my 80s brothers,” John says, his hand traveling to his heart to give it a little dramatic clutch. “All the bar mitzvahs. All the blazers. _All the awkward_.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure the universe’s entire quota of awkwardness is renewed at rich kids’ bar mitzvahs.”

“That’s so beautiful,” John whispers. 

“Speaking of situations that brew awkwardness,” Ally interrupts with a raised eyebrow at John and then at Adam. “Your break?”

“Jesus, sorry — stop being like that, John Cho,” Adam chastised as he grinned and walked out of the room, digging his phone out of his pocket.

Once he was out, Ally stepped on his foot and gave him a Look that was all knit eyebrows and suspicion. “You were pretty insistent on getting him in for an audition — this isn’t some kind of payoff so he doesn’t blackmail you is it?”

“ _What?_ ” John shrieks. He stops to think about it and says, “Man, that sounds like way more fun than the reality.”

“Budding crisis of sexuality?”

“Again, also _way_ more interesting than — I like him!” John shrugs and adds, “I’ve met him a few times, liked his whole schtick, thought it’d be an interesting direction to go in.”

She didn’t believe him, of course, and tried to skeptical-look her way past his insistence. 

That wasn’t happening, though, so after a moment, Ally leans over, checks John’s notes, and murmurs an approval-esque noise. “Yup, that’s what I was thinking. You’re not half-bad at this. Maybe in a few weeks, we’ll even have you picking out extras.” John raises his eyebrows at her and she laughs. “That’s the hierarchy of bullshit paradoxes for you — hardest thing up there is casting the face of a franchise, and then the next hardest is finding people with no individual presence whatsoever. It’s _hard_.” She checks her phone and nudges him in the side. “Who else is on your list, big shot? And are you confident enough to take a few suggestions?”

“Of course, please, suggest away,” John says. “Honestly, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but right now? All the best actors are on television. It’s kind of insane. Meanwhile, movies are full of the same ten guys over and over again. I can barely tell them apart anymore.”

“So this is more TV people we’re going to have to bend over backwards to fit into a shooting schedule?” Ally asks.

“Yeah,” John says apologetically. “You mind much?”

“J.J. will make it work.” John glances at her and scoffs a little, but she’s adamant about it. “He’s either a wizard or he talks too fast for other showrunners to understand what they’re agreeing to, but he gets shit done. How else could he convince ABC to run both a show about a spy and medieval conspiracy theories _and_ people stuck on a twisted, magical island? The man’s a force of nature… or unnatural, one of those, I’m not sure. Maybe both.”

“Chaotic Good?” John suggests.

“Nerd. Also, random question, but do you watch _Supernatural_?”

Once Adam finishes the rest of his audition, John is hesitant to let him escape because he’s mostly completely smitten with his laid back attitude, his slow voice that’s perpetually dripping with sarcasm, and the way John thinks he can fold him up and tuck him into his pocket because he’s so slight. 

When Adam’s finished reading and takes a step towards the door, John lets out a long breath and says, “Hey, actually, do you want to go grab a drink or —“

“You can’t,” Ally interrupts before Adam’s eyes can widen to their full saucer width. “Didn’t you check your email? Damon wants to see us as soon as we’re done here.”

“Oh,” John says. He wonders why his phone didn’t vibrate and then actually turns his head to look at Ally, who — maybe it’s his imagination, maybe this has taken longer than it should have, but she doesn’t look as friendly as she did five minutes ago. “Must’ve missed it, okay, uh.” He looks back to Adam and shrugs. “Some other time when we’re not totally backed up with work, huh?”

“Yeah, totally, find me on Twitter. Thanks for letting me come read.” Adam gives them the quickest, smallest smile John has ever seen and as soon as he leaves, Ally says:

“John, don’t you _ever_ , and I mean _ever_ , do that again, not _ever_.”

“Do what?” John asks. He picks up his phone to look for that email from Damon. He realizes there wasn’t an email when Ally snatches the phone out of his hand and lays it on the other end of the table.

He also realizes she’s probably going to rip off his face and fold it into a bloody, drippy, and flimsy paper football.

“You can’t have someone audition, show them how much you like them, and then _invite them out personally_. I thought you had been _acting_ before today, not… I don’t even know, I mean, do you _live_ in California and know any other actors or work in the entertainment business, or is this your first day _on Earth_?”

“It was just a friendly thing!” John replies defensively. “I didn’t — it wasn’t like a preferential thing!”

“ _John_ ,” Ally snaps. “Why do you think this is a _horrible_ business to be involved in? Because everyone at some point has had that happen to them — give a good audition, have a good conversation with someone in casting, all of a sudden you’re meeting for drinks and —“

“Whoa, hey, no, I wasn’t like, hitting on him or anything,” John rushes to say. “I — he knows that, I just thought he was cool and we should hang out!”

“And that you guys should be friends and hang out and maybe this’ll help his chances. Ugh,” Ally groans disgustedly. “I knew I let you flirt with him too much, I _knew it_.”

“I wasn’t — he knows —“

“Stop looking for friends among people you have to hire,” Ally says firmly. “While you’re here with me, you’ll have the chance to meet actors you respect and like, maybe even some of your friends auditioning for this very significant role, and you _can’t_ lend yourself out like that.”

“I thought we were doing like a good cop/bad cop kind of thing,” John replies.

“This is _The Godfather_ and you just showed Sollozzo how interested you are in his drug deal, _Sonny_ ,” Ally says finally.

And what would the English-speaking world do without a common frame of reference like _The Godfather_? John wheezes and falls over himself to apologize all over Ally’s face. “I am… I am _so sorry_ and…”

“You’re the enemy now, all right? We’ll probably see a hundred people audition for these parts and you’ll know most of them, remember them from sitting outside in that hallway waiting for your chance to get some work, and you _can’t_ let that affect you, okay?”

“I can’t believe I forgot that,” he moans as he rests his head on the table. “All those shitty auditions where I thought I got something because they were really nice to me and friendly and, nope, actually, they were just really nice.”

“Exactly. So don’t fuck with people like that.” 

The scolding seems to be over, John thinks as he keeps his head on the table and turns to rest his cheek on the cool surface, looking up at Ally as she takes down some notes. Her pen seems to be digging into the legal pad like it harmed her in a past life, but the sound is comforting while he reels from fucking up. 

As a rule, he doesn’t fuck up like that — ha, what an easy thing to say, right, but he _doesn’t_. He doesn’t get the giggles while shooting and waste a director’s time; he doesn’t sleep with people for work and he never has, hopes he never will. It’s a misstep like this, one he shouldn’t have made, one that’s relatively huge because of how _basic_ it is, that shakes him deeply. It’s Ally figuratively taking him by the jaw and pointing his face into a deadly blind spot that makes him wonder how many more similar spots are around him and how can he find them before they find a way to fuck him?

It’s the first time that the weight of this project has sauntered down from its abstract, far off summit to sit on his back, forcing him to ask _Can you really handle this?_ Because in two years’ time, reviews will be published in every corner of the internet and people will be talking about this movie, and every time a reviewer says something like, “This person’s performance was awful,” _John could have prevented that_. And he’s not A Casting Agent like Ally, he’s _John Cho_ , and what is that going to _mean_ later?

Ally holds up his phone to his mouth, leans over it to look, and says, “Oh good, you’re still breathing.”

“Why am I even here?” John asks.

“Shut up and go get some coffee,” Ally says, warm and friendly again.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Don’t care, honey, just get us some coffee.”

He drags himself away from the chair and moans the whole way out the door to the in-studio coffee chain, because hamming it up will push this down and away where he can’t think about it for a while.

*

On Ally’s advice, John does his research and scoops up more movie actors to audition for the three roles. Somewhere in the middle of all that, it bugs him that the same realization of _the Romulan captain could be a woman/minority_ just doesn’t work with Gary Mitchell. It’s too…

“Oh, gross,” John groans in the middle of breakfast one morning when he’s finally able to put that discomfort into words. “Do you you want to know _why_ the Kirk counterpart can’t be a minority?” he asks Kerri, who didn’t let his revelation stop her from plowing through her eggs and toast. “Because it would be… horrible. Some fucking PR nightmare where Captain Kirk, symbol of a bright future for America, might have his job outsourced to, like, _me_ , and any _point_ we were supposed to make with the story would be lost in this hysteria where these damn _immigrants_ are _still_ ruining things for wholesome blonds like Chris Pine in the future.”

“Bitter much, hon?” Kerri asks.

“It’s movie quicksand,” John sighs as he dodges the cereal his son is trying to land in his hair. “The harder we flail to get ourselves out, the faster we sink.” Exactly one piece of Kix flies out of his son’s hand and hits John in the corner of his eye. He’s used to it, though, so he brushes it off and meets his son’s shit-eating grin with all the incredulity he can muster. “So, it’s slow steady steps and let’s hope the guy from _The Princess Bride_ is the one hoisting us out, you know?”

“Cary Elwes! I _love_ him. Can he be an admiral or something?”

They… _do_ need a troublemaking Admiral Backstory for the Gary section…

John’s son lands one more piece of Kix on his face and Kerri bursts out laughing. Suddenly he understands why their tagline is “Kid-Tested, Mother-Approved.” Jerks.

*

“So acting has really become like any other job application process,” John says to Misha Collins. “I see from your Twitter feed that you are an _incredible_ troll. Also, all your con appearances. Troll Central.”

“It’s kind of my thing,” Misha admits. “We have fun with it. And hey, aren’t you the official troll of your franchise?”

“Yeah, me and Shatner like to have brunch and talk about how we can fuck with legions of Trekkies.”

Misha gives him a skeptical look and John does nothing to confirm or deny, just provides him with a disconcertingly big smile.

“All right, come on, let’s do some fucking _acting_ ,” Misha announces.

Misha’s the sixth or seventh guy to audition for Gary Mitchell, and while John’s engaged in watching him and taking notes on his performance, a part of him can’t help feel a little bored by the whole process. It’s one thing to be sitting outside the door, running over lines, texting people and checking email, killing time until it’s his turn for 15 minutes with a casting director, but to be behind the table? Watching? Paying attention? It’s draining. It’s _work_ , for fuck’s sake, which he didn’t sign up for, thanks.

Hah, he signed up for a challenge and here it is, the actual _difficult_ part of said challenge, and he’s kind of through with all of it. 

“Sorry, could you start again?” John says as he interrupts Ally reading through Kirk’s dialogue. “From the beginning?”

John pays attention this time, _real_ attention, and Misha seems irritated as John sees this line form between his eyebrows when Misha looks to Ally and tries to ease into Chris’s easy friendly banter. 

 _Tries_ to ease into it.

That’s the thing, isn’t it, John thinks as his mind focuses on what Misha’s actually performing. It’s _not_ easy. It’s Jim Kirk arriving back in San Francisco after six months of doing a hero’s tour of the galaxy, trying to pick up with the friend he left behind, who saw none of the action and got none of the glory. They’ll drink and laugh and exchange stories, and Chris may have written some survivor’s guilt into Kirk’s lines, but John inadvertently pissing Misha off with his dazed unprofessionalism — well, way to go, Cho, he thinks to himself, that makes this catch-up scene all the more interesting. Of course Gary should have a current of irritation under his skin. Of _course_ there’s more to this than meets the eye.

“So, why should you play Gary Mitchell?” John asks as he loudly taps his pen on the legal pad in front of him.

“Well, I’d bring you a legion of new fangirls,” Misha jokes. “I’m also a lot freer this fall because of some shifts on the show’s arc for next season. Have I mentioned this role is kind of amazing?”

“Seems like well-worn territory for you, though, if you know about the original series backstory for this character,” Ally points out. “Intelligent, empathetic third wheel develops not _just_ superhuman, but godlike powers, and has to be destroyed by his friends.”

“That’s not the arc covered in the script, though,” Misha replies. “Like, for all that Kirk likes him and remembers what great friends they were — shit’s changed between them, you know? So the _Enterprise_ may ride off into the sunset under Kirk’s control, but Gary’s still there. The undertones I’m getting here — I think he’s intensely competitive, smarter, and he wouldn’t hesitate to manipulate things in his favor if he thought it was what needed to be done.”

“Which is similar —“

“He doesn’t even have to develop any powers to be a threat to the ship and the crew,” Misha interrupts. John watches Misha look down at his heavily-annotated chunk of script and think it through; if anything, he’s already like, 99% behind casting Misha because they arrived at the same conclusion from reading the same script at least a thousand times. “Keeping Gary alive just draws that out and keeps everyone second-guessing. Now we all know that Spock, unless he really has to, will always be at Kirk’s side — but what about this shifty version of Kirk whose moral compass is just _everywhere_ , and doesn’t limit it to beating the _Kobayashi Maru_?”

It reminds John of something Karl was rambling on about weeks ago while Chris was tinkering with a draft of the script, which is another good sign, a sign they’re all on the same page.

“Someone did their homework,” John says in a sing-song voice. “We’ll keep that in mind, and for the record? I’m very scared of Gary. _And_ you.”

“@johnthecho, right? I’m so going to tweet that. Just that you’re scared of me, not that I’m totally going to get this part and steal the movie out from under you.”

“Two votes for scared,” Ally chimes in. “Thanks, Misha. We’ll be in touch.”

He smiles and walks out, his hand traveling immediately to the pocket with his iPhone. When John looks to Ally, she’s mirroring his expression: baffled and amused intrigue, or something in that neighborhood.

“Ian Somerhalder is just slightly more age-appropriate to be Chris’s mirror and peer, but harder to get due to his schedule,” Ally points out from her notes.

“Wait, are we actually going to talk about all that meta with Misha?” John asks.

“We could,” Ally begins. “But I saw you cross your legs under the table to hide that intellect-induced erection…”

“He’s also really pretty, right?” 

“Sure,” Ally says unconvincingly. “I’m glad you all care so much about the integrity of the story and being faithful to these characters, but that’s a fine line we have to walk, all right?” John tilts his head a little in confusion, so Ally thinks of a way to parse that into small words he can understand at that moment somewhere between his third and fourth grande coffee of the day.

“So one of the reasons we passed on Chris after his first audition,” Ally says, “Is because he pulled a Misha right there, but so much worse.”

“Huh? What?”

“He walked in here, gave a fairly good audition, and then while I talked to him, he kept rambling on about archetypes, the significance of a classic hero like this but updated for the 21st century — a lot of brilliant stuff, all right, but.” Ally lets out a little puff of air from the corner of her mouth that pushes a wisp of hair from the corner of her eye. “J.J. doesn’t want someone who can teach a 14-week class on archetypes in _Star Trek_ , mirroring, and moral relativity; he wants someone who can fight the shit out of some Romulans, whose eyes look electric in a firefight, who can toss quips like cards into a hat. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yeah, and I feel kind of dirty,” John sighs. “It’s nice when actors have brains —” 

“Yes, but what good are those brains when you can’t stand on your mark and deliver a line that conveys all that shit to a viewer?”

John watches Ally organize their Gary Mitchell finalists’ headshots into some categories (“guys we love”, “guys we like”, “guys we were obligated/had to see”, “guys the studio would love”). He’s honestly really fucking amazed at what he’s learned about his own craft in the crash course he’s received while working as a casting director. There’s so much he’s taken for granted, things he did automatically that he’ll now overthink; he’ll never have another easy audition as long as he lives, having been on the other side of the table now. He’s been given a terrible objective glimpse of what he looks like at his most vulnerable when he should be at his most composed and aware, and it’s all awful. 

“Okay, so our top two are Misha and Ian Somerhalder?” John asks when he snaps out of his other thoughts.

“Looks like it. God, I hate that they’re both on TV shows right now,” Ally sighs. “We need to try and find someone else, someone between projects, just in case we can’t hack this. Anyway, Ian?”

“Problem with Ian is that he’s… too devious looking, you know?” John asks as he pulls over Ian’s headshot. “Like, that’s what you’re paying for when you want the Ian Somerhalder experience — someone who makes you feel dirty all over.”

“…And how is that not this character?” Ally asks.

John sighs and stares hard at the headshots in front of him.

“The age thing we can use as a character advantage,” John says slowly, “Like, maybe Gary is a few years older and maybe deserved a ship more than this baby captain they’ve scooped out of Iowa. But Ian’s look is too dark and sinister to play Kirk’s kind-of-lost best friend.”

“His coloring is a little too similar to Zach’s, actually,” Ally points out. 

“Smarmy, that’s what he is,” John says as he hits Ian’s headshot with his pen. “And Misha is, too, like, smarmier than in those _Supernatural_ clips we watched, but Ian is pure smarm —“

“The word’s lost meaning now.”

“It’s like — I never felt that Ian’s Gary was ever a _friend_ to Kirk. If we were setting Gary up to be purely a villain, then fine, we’d go with him.”

Ally thinks about it, agrees, and so they finalize their runners up for Gary Mitchell. For the sake of form and covering all their bases, though, they stay in the studio and see a few more forgettable auditions until every inch of carefully groomed scruff on these cookie cutter handsome actors begins to grate on John’s nerves.

Once they’re done and have dismissed everyone, Ally reads off her phone, “Right, and tomorrow — Romulan officer auditions. This should be fun.”

“It won’t be once Chris finds out I’m leaning towards casting a woman as his Romulan opposite,” John says as he packs his stuff. “But he won’t be here, so I’ll try not to worry about it.”

“Oh, that’s not why he’ll be mad,” Ally says. “It’s when you’re not following his script _to the letter_ ; that’s when he’ll try to murder you. I know writers, John, and they would all marry their egos and manuscripts if it were legal.”

“Yeah, sounds like Chris.” He smiles at Ally and adds, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle him when the time comes.”

She looks skeptical, which he understands, but it’s _Chris_ , their baby (because, face it, Anton is about ten light-years more mature than Chris on any given day), and it totally won’t be a problem.

Probably. Maybe. Maybe? Hopefully.

*

They take three whole days and get all the guys auditioning for the Romulan officers out of the way; on the fourth day, Ally brings in her find, Jaimie Alexander (“that wonderful warrior goddess from _Thor_ ”) to read opposite their first choice for the Romulan captain, Gina Torres.

Jaimie is excited and bubbly when she’s introduced to Gina, which John supposes is nice since getting along is important and all that, but Jaimie switches that out for cool wryness when they actually begin to perform one of their scenes together as the Romulan captain and first officer. 

“Selona,” Gina says, astonished, “You cracked the Starfleet encryption? How have you done what our best specialists have been unable to do since the _Enterprise_ began its reign of chaos across the galaxy?”

“ _Well_ ,” Jaimie says with some subtle pleasure, “It goes back to those Vulcan Vedics I told you about —“

“If this is a test to check whether I read them, Subcommander, then the answer remains ‘I’m busy’, particularly at this moment, so leave me alone. However, please, take my highest praises, I can sing them to you later.”

“No, I’ve learned my lesson in attempting to force classical literature on you,” Jaimie replies. John actually leans on the table and rests his chin on his hands until Ally swats him for being so openly taken with what he’s watching. He can’t help it, though; maybe they talked about it in the hallway or something, but in-character-Jaimie both brushed off the compliments and even flushed a little as she gave her little retort. “Their first officer is the son of the Vulcan ambassador to Earth, and — well, in short, similarly trained minds think alike and assume no one would be — what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Bored enough? Snotty enough?” Gina gives her a brilliant smile and adds, “I can go on all day, but we have some pressing matters that require our attention and your reading habits are, I’m sad to say, not on the list.”

“Of course,” Jaimie says, a little flustered, and shakes her head. “Here’s what we’ve managed to access of their records so far. We’ve saved their extensive personnel files for our reference, but the senior officers are the ones we are likely dealing with.”

“Senior,” Gina scoffs. “This James Kirk was declaiming at school assemblies while I was repairing the damage from my first cruiser mission.” 

“You forget your audience, Tala,” Jaimie says dryly. “You also forget how useful my schoolgirl declaiming has been to us.” 

“One time! Attica II doesn’t count.” She looks to Jaimie, eyebrows raised and what John thinks is a perpetual in-character smirk at the corner of her mouth. “And you may be as young as he is, but far more experienced. Far better in every way. Don’t forget that.”

“Never, Commander.”

Ally steps on his foot this time and he covers up his yelp with a slight cough and a glance down at his notes. He hadn’t realized how he was wrapped up in the scene, but it was worth having his foot stomped — Jaimie had lit up so brightly when she said those two simple words: _Never, Commander_ , and something in her voice had made it sound so loaded with all the backstory they wouldn’t/couldn’t cover in the movie. Like, it had all this sincerity, quiet astonishment, and it came out of left field, and triggered a similar, sweet smile out of Gina. All that because Chris had remembered to add something like [SURPRISED AND SINCERE] in the script.

Gina Torres and Jaimie Alexander — no, for just a few seconds there, they had totally become Tala and Selona for John, and wasn’t that what they were looking for?

“So,” Jaimie says later, when they’ve run through it all a couple of times. “How’d we do?” John watches her face for a moment and how she’s clearly holding back excitement, the same enthusiasm he felt while he was watching them. He opens his mouth to speak, but then looks to Ally for support. He can’t hire anyone himself; he can only put forth finalists and let J.J. and the others approve of his top choices, so he can’t say she has it even if it’s obvious _she totally does_. 

Ally lifts the corner of her mouth slightly, nods, and says, “Thanks for coming in and reading together. We know it was difficult getting your schedules to match up, but we appreciate it. We’ll be in touch once we run through the candidates with the producers. You should hear either way in a couple of weeks.”

Jaimie and Gina leave, talking excitedly with each other, and John lets his head drop to the table. The door closes and John says loudly, “Can we do like, ten thousand more auditions and also no more auditions ever? That was perfect, so they can either get better or they can’t, right?”

“You’re not even speaking English right now,” Ally says as she makes her notes. “That made no sense whatsoever.”

“Also, how do you tell someone that _you_ think they should totally have the part but it’s not really up to you, except I will fight J.J., in a pool of lube with a sharpened bottle of Diet Coke if I have to so they can have the part?”

Ally looks at him and shakes her head.

“First of all — it’s not your movie. You’re doing a job for J.J. and he and the others can decide that you went in the totally wrong direction. You might find yourself here again after you’ve shown them your top picks.”

John wants to spit back something like, “Yeah, well, nobody puts Cho in the corner,” but it never quite makes it out past the sulk on his lips.

“Also, I did let her know,” Ally says. “The smile and nod, rather than the quick dismissal? How long have you been acting again?”

“Clearly not long enough,” John sighs. “What if she takes another job? What if we can’t get Gina? What if it’s not perfect?

“My recommendation is this: when we’re done here, go home to some wine and get your presentation ready for J.J. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out,” she shrugs. “It could work out and one of them could drop out in the middle of everything and production halts to find someone else and file breach of contract suits, and maybe the movie never gets made. Everything could go wrong before you ever step on the set — just do what you have to do, then others do what _they_ have to do, and maybe we’ll have a movie in 18-24 months, okay?”

John can’t help but remember all the failed movies he’s been in, some of them that never even took off or got past the first three days of shooting because of all these problems holding up the works; then there’s everything that has held up _this_ movie. He hopes this hasn’t all been for nothing. Suddenly, the wine sounds like a really good idea.

*

Zach rears his beady little eyes a few days after the last auditions near the end of August, as John is preparing his presentation of their finalists for the new roles.

“Did you honestly send out a call that said _the female Zachary Quinto, must be comfortable losing eyebrows_?” 

“I think it also said something about filling out a pair of pants really well; it was a while ago, that shit’s hard to remember,” John jokes. “Anyway, did J.J. call you about the big casting meeting next week? You should come out here, Mr. Producer sir. I stole one of his interns so she can put together a slideshow of my top two for each of the big roles.”

“Spoil me. Tell me who you’re going for.”

“But it’s a surprise!”

“John! I _hired_ you. I’m a _producer_. You have to tell me.”

“Not if you’re going to _whine_ about it. Why can’t you wait to find out at the same time as J.J.?”

“Because that’s not how the fucking chain of command works, John,” Zach snaps. “I don’t want J.J. sitting there as you babble on about some dickhead you’ve engaged, and then when he turns to ask me a question, I can’t answer him because _durr, this is the first I’ve heard of it — just ask John!_ ”

“So when you said I’d be able to do this by on my own —“

“Yeah, and reporting back to me. I need names, numbers, and availability, and you can’t confirm anyone without all of us giving you the okay.”

“Well of course not, I wasn’t —“

“I’m just making sure because you haven’t checked in with me for _weeks_ , John —“

“Like _a week_ , Zach, maybe two at most.”

“ — and if I thought you were moving auditions along so quickly, I would have come out to see a few, but now they’re over and we’re _finalizing_ these roles? Where was I? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Hey, buddy, at no point did you tell me that I was supposed to pull you to LA by your jaunty ascot and let you mouthbreathe over my shoulder as I ran auditions because _this never came up_ in our ten million emails back and forth. _Chris_ has to have mentioned it at some point —“

“Chris didn’t know either! He heard the Cary Elwes thing in passing from you and called me, _terrified_ , because —“

“It’s not his damn business anymore. Ally told me —“

“It’s not _his business_ anymore? It’s his script, John!” 

“Yeah, okay, but _you_ told me that it’s not his responsibility anymore, and Damon and everyone — too many cooks in the kitchen, remember? If Chris is going to throw a fit over Cary Elwes AKA Middle-aged White Dude playing Powerful Middle-aged Dude, then wait until he sees that we’re going with two women for the Romulan crew.”

“What the _fuck_? Are they like Amazons now or something?”

“What the _fuck_? Are you like a sexist asshole now or something?”

“That’s just not how I read that part of the script. That’s not how Chris wrote it, or how the notes Bob and Alex —“

“Bob and Alex didn’t write _shit_ , that’s why you got Chris in the first place! Things change, okay, and we —“

“I just need to see your list of candidates before you put together the presentation for J.J., and we’ll talk about it, okay? Send all that over today and I’ll call you when I’m done going through all of it.”

Zach hangs up on him and John would be tempted to drink but that’s _just what he wants, isn’t it_. 

“I AM TOO ANGRY TO MAKE SENSE,” John yells at his phone and near Kelly the intern.

“Apparently,” she replies airily.

“Can you finish all that today?” John asks as he rubs the bridge of his nose. “That was Zach. The Quintster. Light and bane of my life. He wants everything, uh, _now_. Today.”

She bites her lip hard in concentration and looks appraisingly at John’s computer. “If you’re willing to stop playing Angry Birds on there and let me call my friend so he can help me edit these audition videos, then yeah, we might have something by 4 PM latest. It won’t be pretty, but I can make it pretty for J.J. next week.”

“You are _so_ earning all that college credit, kid,” John assures her. “Call your friend, take my computer, I’ll be in J.J.’s secret green office yelling at people if you need me to yell at you, too.”

“That’s all right; I work surprisingly well without verbal abuse,” Kelly replies. “Though a Diet Coke would be amazing.”

“If I know even the vaguest location of _anything_ in this building, it’s the Diet Coke stash,” John says.

As Kelly grabs her phone and begins texting her backup, John leaves the little corner of the Bad Robot offices J.J. let him borrow to do all the Trek work while J.J. himself is off doing who-the-fuck-knows on however-fucking-many secret projects that haven’t been entered into IMDBPro yet. He’s swearing to himself and plotting who to call first, but by the time he rediscovers the Diet Coke storehouse hidden behind a wall-mounted magazine rack in the front lobby, he can’t figure out who he wants to yell at and who he has any actual grievances against. 

Zach should have checked in more often rather than fucking off to New York, Europe, and SDCC during all the script finalizing; Chris should have kept his mouth shut and found a fucking job; he, clearly, should have developed telepathy and seen all the fleeting thoughts in Zach’s mind, the quiet whispers of _call me, John, tell me everything even though I asked you to be a casting director so I wouldn’t have to worry like this and you could do all the hard work for me_. 

He brings Kelly an armful of Diet Cokes then heads outside to the grassy knoll Bad Robot sits on, flicking through messages on his iPhone. John finally calls Ally and vents about how he was just reamed out by Zach.

“Yeah… I don’t know what to tell you except that he’s new,” Ally says eventually. “And it sounds like he thinks he lost control for a few nanoseconds there and wants to be caught up in everything again. I’m not sure he had to pepper it with so much _asshole_ , though, as if I would have let you get ahead of yourself.”

“Right?!” John shrieks. “And J.J. has ears all over, like, he wouldn’t let us hire someone without his okay — again, not that we’d be stupid enough to _do that_.”

“You’re sending him the final six, though, right? He does need to know that before J.J. He might know something you don’t. Rampant coke problem comes to mind, but I won’t say who or where.”

“Uh, try everyone everywhere. Thanks, though; I needed to hear that from a non-insane person.”

“No problem. Actually, whatever you’re getting together for Zach? Send it to everyone — all the producers, I mean — and then next week at the meeting, we can just cut to the chase and make our choices. We should have talked about that before you geared up to have a big reveal showcase showdown for J.J. and sprung it all on them.”

It’s reasonable enough and it’s not coming directly from Zach, so John can do that without spite, malice, or self-sabotage. Maybe.

*

Ally (and, as much as John was loathe to admit it, Zach) was completely right — John would have been setting himself up for an aneurysm and/or trying to decapitate himself with a spork if he had forced J.J., Damon, Bob, Alex, Bryan Burk, Zach, and Chris to sit in a room and comb through photos, clips, facts, and trivia about John and Ally’s big casting decisions. 

As it was, sitting in a room and yelling for nearly two hours was _much_ more productive.

“Here’s the thing,” John says as he interrupts Chris from his sixth iteration of _that’s not how I wrote it_. “I can send you _all_ the audition videos, not just these few here — we brought the final six for the Romulan parts in and I paired them up randomly, deliberately, in every fucking combination I could think of, and none of them worked as well _with what you wrote, Chris_ , as Gina Torres and Jaimie Alexander. Like, man, I wanted Adam Scott to work out, but he and Gina had _no_ chemistry whatsoever.”

“What about the _Game of Thrones_ guy, uh, Richard Madden?” Zach asks, flicking through their portfolio of candidates on his iPad just like the other big boys.

“Well, never mind that he’ll be fuck knows where filming and promoting _Game of Thrones_ at the same time we’re filming, but again — chemistry didn’t work. Never mind that putting two _more_ white guys at the lead of yet another segment of a blockbluster movie; like, I’m sorry guys, but I’m sick of it,” John says.

There’s a nicely awkward pause where no one speaks. J.J. looks up briefly from his iPad and then looks back down, and John thinks about how to continue the “discussion” they’re sort of not having. 

“Know why I didn’t call any of the big name guys back for the final four?” John continues. “Because I literally _called the wrong agency for the wrong guy_. I think it was like, Timothy Olyphaunt and the _Hawaii Five-0_ guy. I couldn’t tell them apart anymore, and if _I_ couldn’t? Who’s to say all of these faces won’t just blur together for everyone else who isn’t nearly as invested in this as we are?”

“Poor Alex,” Damon sighed. “Standout scruffy beauty just won’t cut it anymore, huh?”

“That and they all have the same vaguely cheeky action hero demeanor that is just _so_ predictable right now,” John says.

There’s a lull in the arguing and they all slowly look to J.J., who’s still looking at something/everything on his iPad and drinking from the 20 oz Diet Coke that won’t leave his claw until next June. He finally notices the silence and their stares, and makes a little sound of surprise. 

“Yeah, I agree, Gina and Jaimie blew everyone else out of the water — sorry, Chris, but I’m sure we’ll have no problem switching some pronouns around to make it more awesome,” J.J. says casually. “They didn’t hesitate making it work for the audition. They loved it. Rolled right with it, made it work for them. We need that.”

That’s that. John looks across the table at Chris, who looks resigned and he honestly can’t see why he’s so upset — John went out and found the best possible people to do justice to Chris’s story and words, and he’s _sulking_ about it in front of the people who just _made his career_? He spares Chris an eye roll and looks to his notepad, scrawling a little _YAY G/J!!_ note to himself for later.

“So that leaves Misha for Gary, right?” Zach says finally.

“What?” J.J. asks, still distracted. “Yeah, totally. That was never up for debate. I know him — smart, hardworking, kind of a dick — you’re going to love and hate him, which is how I read Gary in Chris’s treatment of that episode, so yeah, Misha it is.” J.J. sets his iPad aside and says, “Seriously, we’re on track. Go make those final offers, get some contracts drafted, wait a week before leaking this to the press — we’re ready.”

Bryan, old hat at this sort of thing, clears his throat suggestively, which prompts J.J. to pry his mouth off the Diet Coke and add, “You’ve all done _so_ well, okay, like — okay, Ally, you’re my superstar, always and forever, you know that, it’s tattooed across my chest, but you three —“ He makes eye contact with Zach, Chris, and John in turn and tries to give them each something like a Significant Look, even though that requires more attention than he’s capable of giving to any one person at one time. “You guys have done so well, like, we thought we’d have way more fires to put out but it looks like… we’re good. We’re ready. You guys did it.”

Zach, Chris, and John exhale for the first time in three months and tentatively make eye contact with each other, the sniping of the past couple of hours fading away now that the soothing balm of approval has been rubbed by Papa J.J. all over their bruised egos.

*

Once outside in the parking lot, John grabs Chris by a bulky bicep and drags him shouting and surprised into his arms for a bear hug of epic proportions. “Not letting you go until you stop being mad at me.”

“I’m not _mad_ at you,” Chris says while his mouth is muffled against John’s shoulder. 

“Come on, let it out, baby, just hold me tight and yell and curse all you want,” John says soothingly, hoping this actually fucking works in making Chris forgive him for adapting his white male starship party script into something for all genders and ethnicities to enjoy — because John is _such_ an asshole for that.

Chris finally sighs and sags against John a little. John looks past Chris’s head at Zach and the high arches of his eyebrows so that Zach takes notice that Chris has settled his head on John’s shoulder and snuggled a little into the curve of his neck. Zach’s eyebrows seem to scream _I NEED ALCOHOL AND I NEED IT YESTERDAY_ with just the slightest hint of sympathy or whatever byproduct passes for it with Zach.

“I just need to hear that you thought my script was good,” Chris says finally. “That you’d call your agent and demand to be in on that shit if you weren’t already contractually bound to be in it, you know?”

Shit, is _that_ what this is about?

Shit. He’s not equipped to deal with this kind of sincerity.

Shit.

Past Chris’s shoulder, Zach taps his bare wrist to indicate that time is ticking and that time is booze and it needs to be in his liver right goddamn now.

“Chris, that’s why I was such an asshole in there,” John admits. He pulls away from Chris but keeps his hands on Chris’s shoulders, looking into his eyes like he does to his son sometimes (except his son usually babbles back something more comprehensible than the stuff found in Chris’s head most of the time).  “All those calls I made? Those choices? All those fucking auditions? I wouldn’t have done any of this if your script was bad. Like, I could have just said _fuck this_ and gone back to doing Trek cons all summer and driving my wife crazy, or taking some more movie roles. _Instead_ , I donated my summer vacation to putting your fucking story on the big screen, and why would I have done that if I didn’t believe in it, you know?”

It’s a lot of words and Chris pulls him in for another, tighter hug before unceremoniously letting go and straightening up, which means: A) he’s accepted John’s explanation or B) he’s stopped caring, or Secret Option C[hris]) literally anything and doesn’t have to be justified by anything more than Chris’s whim at that particular moment.

John realizes that he _means it_ as Chris ambles over to his car and calls out something to Zach. He watches Chris flail and gesticulate by the driver’s side door at something Zach is yelling about and — man, when did John grow a Chris-shaped chip on his shoulder and how had he managed to shake it _just_ now? How had he forgotten it was _Chris_ he was working with this whole time, that bounding puppy of a dork who looked up to John when he thought no one else was looking? In the future, John thinks, he can’t forget that he actually loves Chris like a little sister, even when they have the occasional shrieking match on the nature of race and privilege and the perpetuation of that in the media as well as how it affects their careers.

Or something.

“Come on, let’s get some drinks!” Chris announces. “And then we have to get to the gym!”

“That sounds totally heterosexual to me,” John says. “Let’s go.”


	5. Filming -- Los Angeles -- Winter 2011

It’s the first real day of filming (none of this boring second unit stuff) and Chris and Zoe spot Zach first. 

They let Zach know he’s been spotted with loud, echoing cackles on the steps outside Chris and Zach’s trailer. Zoe laughs hard enough to almost fall off the steps to the trailer until Chris pulls her back so they can hold each other and laugh.

“We’re so immature,” Zoe sobs. “We’re such fucking babies.”

“I bet —“ Chris snorts hard enough for it to hurt and adds, “Those glasses aren’t even prescription.”

Zoe gasps loudly and clutches at Chris again. “ _He looks like Leonard_. In those — you know, the whale movie? With the —“

They burst into manic howling again and don’t notice Zach has arrived in front of them until he huffs and blows a lock of bowl cut bangs out of his eyes. 

“Excuse me,” he says.

“Come on, baby, we just wanna see you,” Zoe coos as she reaches for his glasses. She doesn’t make it, though, as she recoils and laughs before she reaches the frame. “They’re not prescription,” she stage-whispers to Chris.

“Of course not; I have my contacts on,” Zach replies. He sighs again, heavier this time, and points out, “This isn’t the first time you’ve seen me like this.“

Chris stops laughing and looks at Zach solemnly. He even wipes the tears from the corners of his eyes and grabs both of Zach’s hands, holding them tightly in his own.

“Zach, my Spock before all others,” Chris says seriously. “Every time is like the first time.” He considers it for a moment and then adds, “I mean, for shaving your eyebrows and whatever they’ve done to your hair — everything else, not so much? I mean, every time was good but —“

Zach wails a little and turns around quickly at the flash of light that goes off behind him. He turns around quickly and Karl yells, “Stop it, Zach, I’m making the _Enterprise_ fly out of your ass.”

“ _What_?”

“Shh just let it happen,” Chris whispers as he pats Zach’s hands some more. “Don’t fight it.”

“It’s the first _day_ , Karl! It’s like 6 AM on the _first. day._ ”

“So… what you’re saying is…?” Karl asks. 

“Zach, J.J. says you need to be in make up yesterday,” John says as he walks out with a breakfast sandwich the size of his face.

“I _was_ in make up yesterday,” Zach replies. He points to his eyebrows and hair and asks, “Who do you think _did this_ to me?”

“I dunno, the dog, maybe, he’s good with scissors, right?” John asks. “I mean, good for a dog, which is bad for humans. Your eyebrows look hilarious, is what I’m saying.”

“I dare you to say that in the makeup trailer,” Zach says. 

“Zach,” John laughs, “I’m not _that_ stupid.”

“Come on, I’ll rescue you,” Chris interrupts. John holds his arms out like a child asking to be picked up, but Chris scoffs at him. Instead, Chris grabs Zach’s hand again, pulls himself off the trailer’s steps, and puts an arm around his shoulders to guide him off to the land of makeup and eternal tweezing. 

“Chris, you traitor!” Zoe calls out. “Now we’re gonna laugh about _both of you_ behind your backs!”

“I don’t think you understand how gossip works!” Chris yells back.

“Ugh, I somehow forgot what this was like,” Zach sighs as he and Chris walk towards makeup, arms still around each other. “Always being on, always lining up snappy comebacks, not believing anything anyone says for the next two years.”

“Yeah, you’re going to have to rebuild that mental queue of ‘things to call Zoe that are only gently insulting so she doesn’t kick your ass,’” Chris replies.

J.J. is stalking across the lot with his pre-Coke bucket of coffee, but walks past them so quickly that he has to double take and circle around them like he’s following some invisible complicated highway on the ground. “Finally,” J.J. says quietly, making Chris think back and wonder whether he’s ever actually heard J.J. raise his voice at any of them or ever. How is he simultaneously the most high-strung and caffeinated man on the planet, but also the most quiet and mellow? “Where ever you’re going, cancel and go straight to makeup. Zach, not Chris, unless you want your highlights touched up.”

“I just got them done yesterday,” Chris says as he looks up at the hair he can’t see.

“Are you sure they’re new?” J.J. asks. “Because they look dull and sad.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry, can we take a moment of silence for my eyebrows and the 70% of my face that was waxed yesterday?” Zach asks. 

“Yeah, totally did that yesterday; I heard your hair cry out, a voice in the wilderness, clear the way for the Lord is coming, just before they were torn from the motherland of your face,” J.J. replies. “The more time we hang out here, by the way, the less time they have to pluck and squeeze you into Spock.”

“We’re doing character-building stuff,” Zach says as Chris puts his other arm around Zach and hugs him close. “See? Kirk and Spock are friends now.”

“Maybe more,” Chris says lasciviously.

“Mmm, okay, don’t care, anyway, it’s first day stuff so Chris, during morning break, I need you and Karl to talk to some blogger I owe a favor to for like, opening day scoop or whatever, and then at lunch, Zach, you and John can talk to her for 15 about putting the movie together, okay? Now go to makeup, I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Wait,” Zach says as J.J. speeds away. “Aren’t Chris and I doing anything together?”

“I don’t know, are you?” J.J. asks with an undertone of _this conversation has gone on at least ten times longer than I intended and if this is about your epic gay love I really don’t care no seriously DON’T CARE why aren’t either of you coffee_. 

“No, I mean like — aren’t we doing any interviews together?” Zach asks. 

“Oh, yeah, at some point I guess?” J.J. sips from his coffee rather than inhale oxygen like other humans, and Chris watches him consider what Zach is saying like he hadn’t thought about it before. Zach shifts a little and starts to speak so he can help him along the road to meaning.

“You know, because —“

“No, I know,” J.J. interrupts. “I’m thinking we should take some new angles on promotion this time around, you know?”

“Oh,” Chris says. He sounds like he’s deflating as he says that and — he _feels_ flat. He feels like he’s taken a sudden punch to the diaphragm or someone stuck a nail in him to let all the air out. _New angles on promotion_ sounds… well. Like the press tour hijinks that made the whole trip around the world in 30 days thing bearable would now become — less so.

“Yeah, like, I’m kind of over the whole homoerotic action hero thing — no one does that better than you two, believe me, I mean you really fell on each other trying to convince people of your undying love and everything —“

“Is he being ironic,” Zach asks Chris under his breath.

“I don’t know. Don’t move and maybe he’ll forget we’re here,” Chris replies without moving his mouth.

“But this is the sequel, guys,” J.J. says. He looks at his coffee cup for a second and then back to Chris and Zach. “Two-thirds of your contracts fulfilled — Zach, you’ll probably be _forty_ by the time you’re done with Trek forever, and that’s if they don’t rope you into renewing, which’ll probably come up at the end of filming this thing.”

Chris’s arm is still around Zach’s shoulders and he doesn’t quite realize how tightly he’s clawing at Zach’s shoulder until he feels Zach’s arm rest on the small of his back, clawing for some kind of purchase there, too. 

“So…” Chris says dryly.

“So rather than, you know, do the whole _best boyfriends in love!!!_ thing for promotion this time around — let’s face it, anyone can do that, literally anyone if you deprive them of sleep and their homes, just from sheer exhaustion they’ll give a _coffee table_ a long, lingering look and banter with it, but apparently if you do that with another man, you can sell movie tickets and a franchise.”

Chris gulps audibly and can practically hear the manic hamster in J.J.’s brain run faster and faster, generating power and ideas to destroy their pleasantly unsatisfying status quo. “Let’s focus on what you’re actually doing with your careers, you know? Chris, you wrote a pretty amazing script — wouldn’t you want to do more of that? And Zach, you like, produced a movie. We’re here because you _produced_ a big-budget blockbuster movie. It just doesn’t get bigger than a _Star Trek_ movie. Same goes for John and Karl — okay, Karl kind of, he’s already told me he’s not interested, he likes his action hero niche just fine. John doesn’t want to talk about it until filming’s done. But you’ve both taken huge leaps forward making this movie happen — don’t you want something to come of this past summer? Or is this —” J.J. waves his free hand at the bustling lot around them and Chris is both sure and not-very-sure of what exactly J.J. means by that. “— the only thing you want?”

They’re standing still and both stammer simultaneously, but J.J. holds a hand up and sips from his coffee again. “I know, it’s a lot for 6 AM the day after you’ve had your eyebrows waxed,” he says, “But think about it and try not to mention all that stuff about homoeroticism as a tired publicity trope in your interviews and hey, maybe think about growing as adults? Go to makeup. See you in a bit.”

Just like that, J.J. walks off towards set and leaves Chris and Zach there, clutching at each other, kind of unsure of where to go or how to get there.


End file.
